
Glass _ 
Book. 



_1_ 



Copyright 1n k 



COF5MGHT DEPOSIT. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
The Minister as a Man 



16mo. Net, 35 cents. 



The Individualistic Gospel 

And Other Essays 



By 
ANDREW GILLIES 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



BR •- 



Copyright, 1919, by 
ANDREW GILLIES 



OCI -3 f 919 



I.A535142 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER FAQS 

Prefatory Note 7 

I. Concerning "The Challenge of the 

Church" 9 

II. Of Trying to Be a Christian 25 

III. Shall the Severity of God Be 

Preached? 37 

IV. The Impossibility of Neutrality. . . 49 
V. If I Were a Young Minister 59 

VI. The Sin of Self-Deception 71 

VII. The Preacher and the Demand for 

a Simple Gospel 81 

VIII. November and June in Religion ... 93 
IX. The Need of a New Conception 

of God 101 

X. The Individualistic Gospel and the 

Modern Church 117 

XI. The Individualistic Gospel and the 

Modern Church (Continued) 131 

XII. The Basic Weakness of the Modern 

Church 149 

XIII. Salvation, Individual and Social. . . 167 
XIV. The Eternal Gospel and the Age 

of Reconstruction 183 

Index 201 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The following chapters are based upon articles 
which appeared in The Christian Advocate, The 
Methodist Review, and The Bibliotheca Sacra and 
are published in their present form with the kind 
consent of the editors of those periodicals. Grate- 
ful acknowledgment is also due the following pub- 
lishers and authors for permission to quote at 
length from the books and publications named: 

The Macmillan Company : Introduction to the 
Philosophy of Religion, Principal Caird ; Religion 
as Life, Henry Churchill King; Jesus Christ and 
the Social Question and Jesus Christ and the In- 
dividual, Francis A. Peabody ; Life of John Wes- 
ley, Caleb T. Winchester; The Preacher and The 
Work of Preaching, Arthur S. Hoyt. 

Charles Scribner's Sons : Outlines of Christian 
Theology, William Newton Clarke ; Sermons, Hor- 
ace Bushnell ; Men and Books, Austin Phelps. 

Houghton Mifflin Company: Religion and 
Miracle, George A. Gordon; Life of Jonathan 
Edwards, A. V. G. Allen ; The Christian Ministry, 
Lyman Abbott. 

The Pilgrim Press: Lectures on Preaching, 
Henry Ward Beecher. 

The James Clarke Company, London, England, 
through their American representatives, The 
Pilgrim Press : Faith's Certainties, J. Brierley. 

7 



8 PREFATORY NOTE 

Henry Holt & Co. : On Some of Life's Ideals, 
William James. 

Longmans, Green & Co. : Varieties of Religious 
Experience, William James. 

The Century Company : Reminiscences of Tol- 
stoy, Count Ilya Tolstoy. 

George H. Doran Company : Pulpit, Platform, 
Parliament, C. Silvester Home; A History of 
Preaching, Edwin Charles Dargan. 

The H. C. Doran Company: Life of Thomas 
Chalmers, Fraser. 

Fleming H. Revell Company : The Passion for 
Souls, J. H. Jowett; The Principles of Jesus, 
Robert E. Speer; Letters of Samuel Rutherford; 
Life of David Livingstone. 

Harper & Bros. : Short History of the English 
People, Green ; Works of Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge. 

E. P. Dutton & Co. : Lectures on Preaching, the 
Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D. 

The Association Press : The Social Principles 
of Jesus, Walter Rauschenbusch. 

Cassell and Company: Can We Still Follow 
Jesus? Principal Garvie. 

The Atlantic Monthly Company : The Atlantic 
Monthly. 

The Methodist Book Concern: The Methodist 
Review. 

The Rochester Post-Express Company : J. Le 
Moyne Dannar, Dean Charles R. Brown, G. H. 
Johnston Ross, Shailer Mathews, Lyman Abbott, 
Charles H. Parkhurst and George A. Coe. 

For all fugitive quotations credit has been given 
where source was known. A. G. 



CHAPTER I 

CONCERNING "THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
CHURCH" 



There are more stoics in the army than we commonly think. 
But this austerity of outlook, even if it were within the ca- 
pacity of everybody, is wholly satisfying to nobody. And 
the same must be said of a resolute cult of natural beauty 
sustained by some of the more gifted and poetical minds 
(like Alan Seeger for example), with a certain greatness of will 
which still fails to conceal from others or from themselves the 
heart full of pain beneath, unreconciled and unconvinced. — 
William E. Hocking, 

The Christian life is the life of Christ in the believer. There 
never was but one Christian life and that is Christ's life. I 
am not playing with words. If anyone chooses to say that 
men can be Christians though they do not believe in Christ 
nor accept him as a Saviour — very well! But they are not 
Christians in the New Testament sense of that word. — J. Le 
Moyne Danner, 

The more literally lost you are, the more literally you are 
the very being whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved. 
Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to 
sick souls as straight as this message from Luther's personal 
experience. As Protestants are not all sick souls, reliance on 
what Luther exults in calling the dung of one's merits, the 
filthy puddle of one's own righteousness, has come to the 
front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view^of 
Christianity to the deeper wants of our human mental struc- 
ture is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a 
new and quickening thing. — William James, 

Upon a rational and nonmiraculous experience no church 
can live, and a nation must sin to die. Nor, on the other 
hand, can the soul live on mere miracle, on the merely unin- 
telligible. The church can exist neither on a classicism nor on 
a romanticism, but on a new creation. It can live only upon 
what created it — upon the miracle of grace, upon the evan- 
gelical experience of men new created by God's word and 
gift, on the conversion which, as Goodwin says, is the standing 
miracle in the church. . . . The church must choose its foun- 
dation principle from these two and regulate the nature of its 
comprehension accordingly — idealism with moral atony or 
redemption with conscience in command of the social life. — 
P. T. Forsyth. 



CHAPTER I 

CONCERNING "THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
CHURCH" 

A great deal is being said and written just now 
about "the challenge of the church." And there 
may well be, for there is a subtle and invisible 
something of which that favorite phrase is the 
best possible expression. It seems to me, however, 
that the peril in the situation lies in the failure 
to understand just what that something is. 
Usually it is presented as an unparalleled oppor- 
tunity, the compulsion to heroic endeavor created 
by the impending task of world reconstruction. 
And, of course, that is true as far as it goes, but 
the fact is that it does not go far enough. Like 
a great deal of superficial diagnosis, it deals with 
symptoms, not causes. The real challenge deals 
with causes and, rightly understood, gives hope 
of permanent effects. 

Let me illustrate what I mean. One morning 
I picked up two papers from my den table. One 
was The Stars and Stripes, the official publication 
of the American Expeditionary Force, in France. 
It contained an editorial entitled "Salvation," in 
11 



12 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

which the editor, after berating a speaker at one 
of the halls for asking those of his hearers who 
wanted to come to God to stand up, went on to 
say: 

"There are a good many men in the army who 
hold the belief that a man who, with a gun in his 
hand and a smile on his face, takes his chance 
in the battle line in this war, who faces death for 
the principles for which we are fighting, is work- 
ing out his salvation and does not need to stand 
up in a back hall. . . . And we have chaplains, 
men in army khaki and steel helmets and gas 
masks, men who stand at our side in the front 
line — men of God, if ever there have been — who 
not only hold, but were the first to express this 
conviction." 

The other paper was The Christian Advocate, 
and it happened to contain an address entitled 
"Advice to a Soldier," written by John Wesley, 
published in pamphlet form and distributed among 
the British army camps in 1743. In that address 
the human founder of Methodism lays before his 
readers the alternatives of salvation or damna- 
tion, heaven or hell, and in no uncertain terms 
says that the conditions of salvation for a soldier 
on the battlefield are just what they are for any 
other man, namely, repentance for sin and faith 
in the Lord Jesus Christ. 

It would be exceedingly interesting to isolate 



"CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH" IS 

the Stars and Stripes' claim and examine it 
frankly. Does the act of fighting in a good cause 
automatically put a man on good terms with 
God and assure him of salvation, in spite of the 
fact that he has no conscious faith, and regardless 
of his personal character? Dr. W. E. Hocking, 
of Harvard, deals with it from the standpoint 
of a philosopher and refuses to be caught in the 
rising tide of emotionalism. He says: 

"We shall not find the genuine elements of hope 
in the situation by glossing over its sobering 
traits, nor yet by succumbing to the temptation 
to say that the soldier is subconsciously religious. 
. . . A religion that a man does not know he has 
is of no importance." (The italics are mine.) 

It is more to the purpose, however, to take the 
editorial, raw as it is, and John Wesley's address, 
blunt as it sounds in this age of soft phrases, as 
representative of two schools of thought in mod- 
ern religion and two ways of entering upon the 
vast work of reconstruction between which the 
church must, in a very real sense, make a choice. 

The term "liberal" is just as good as any other 
with which to designate the one school. Probably 
one ought to say "schools," for it is made up of 
a series of intellectual movements rather than of 
one. Its rationalistic aspect has been well de- 
scribed by Dr. J. H. Odell in the words : "Every 
minister knows that from the days of Ferdinand 



14 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

Christian Baur, founder of the Tubingen school, 
down to the latest word from P. W. Schmiedel, 
there has been a patient, indefatigable and relent- 
less effort to squeeze every possible trace of the 
supernatural from the Old and New Testaments." 
Another aspect of it consists of the radical appli- 
cation of the evolutionary hypothesis to the moral 
and spiritual worlds, substituting an upward 
thrust of all things, in whose beneficent results 
every man shares, for a world of contending forces 
in which every man's destiny depends upon his 
conscious personal choice. It is true that there 
are those who believe in both, but that does not 
materially affect the situation. Another aspect 
has been greatly intensified by the war. It is 
represented by modern sentimentalism, the re- 
fusal to face the stern facts of an ethical universe ; 
by the vague feeling, not only on the part of many 
enlisted men, but multitudes of others, that "God 
will not be too hard on them, whatever happens." 
And yet another aspect is found in the attempted 
substitution of a spiritual idealism for historical 
Christianity. In the words of a writer in the 
Hibbert Journal, "Can a Christ ideal, identified 
with the true, the good, and the beautiful, be sub- 
stituted for the historical person of Jesus Christ, 
without fundamentally overturning Christianity 
as a spiritual religion?" 

The other position is what has always been 



"CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH" 15 

known as evangelical Christianity. That it has 
undergone radical changes since Wesley's time is 
a mere truism. Many of the beliefs of a prescien- 
tific age have been done away with entirely. Some 
of the basic doctrines have been greatly modified 
in form. In the words of one of its most advanced 
exponents, "We now see creation, revelation, 
atonement and salvation as processes rather than 
as separate facts, though there are great out- 
standing facts as parts of the process, as distinct 
registers of a given advance." Moreover, its 
spirit and method are fast changing. It is con- 
ceded that truth is dynamic, not static; that 
saving faith is not acquiescence in a dogma about 
Christ, but a vital trust in Christ, and that there 
is room on the evangelical foundation for wide 
differences of opinion on subsidiary matters. But 
the essence of this gospel is permanent. Man is 
not merely imperfect. He is stained by sin and 
held blameworthy by a holy God, who has written 
the infinite consequences of sin into the very fiber 
of his being. Jesus Christ is not evolution's finest 
product or the world's greatest saint, but the 
world's only Saviour, who atoned on Calvary for 
man's sin. Salvation is a spiritual rebirth, 
brought about by conscious repentance and faith, 
and, conversely, by a beneficent work of grace 
wrought in the personality by the Holy Spirit. 
And so the saved man is not the same man grown 



16 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

to nobler proportions. He is a new man, living 
a new life in a new universe. Those are but im- 
perfect statements, but the eternal verities for 
which they stand constitute the heart of the 
gospel on the evangelical foundation, that part 
which the vicissitudes of time cannot change or 
destroy. 

Now, it seems perfectly obvious that this inter- 
pretation of God, Christ, life, and human destiny 
is absolutely contradictory to the varying inter- 
pretations of the intellectual movement or move- 
ments at which we have glanced. The man who 
believes in salvation by culture or the unconscious 
assimilation of an all-pervasive spirit of goodness 
and the man who believes in salvation by a definite 
and conscious adventure of faith, by personal 
oneness with a personal Saviour, are not traveling 
the same intellectual road, with one just a bit in 
advance of the other. They are traveling in 
opposite directions and between them is "a great 
gulf fixed." A compromise between the two points 
of view is as impossible as it was between the two 
civilizations so lately locked in a death grapple 
on the battle fields of Europe and Asia. And yet 
the astounding thing is that both are found in 
adjoining pews and in neighboring pulpits of the 
same denomination. "The privilege of taking 
one's creed in a figurative sense has done yeoman 
service in the cause of church cohesion. Those 



"CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH" 17 

who regard God as a name, solemn style, for the 
fortunate legality of events in nature, or for the 
upward trend of organic evolution, find themselves 
joined in apparent fellowship with those for whom 
God is still a personal will, and so forth." Or, 
in the words of a doughty protagonist of intelli- 
gent evangelicalism: "Two streams meet in our 
contemporary Christianity, and however they may 
keep the same bed in the current reach of history's 
stream, they do not blend." 

The forced option presented to the church by 
this anomalous situation seems to me to constitute 
the real challenge with which the church is met 
to-day. Three years ago P. T. Forsyth, in an 
article in the Methodist Review, said: "We must 
decide whether our faith rests on a new creation 
or an immanent evolution; whether the Christian 
experience is a thing entirely per se (and autono- 
mous accordingly, though not unrelated to the 
rest of experience), or whether it is a sectional 
product of spiritual humanity and cosmic evolu- 
tion at an ideal height; whether it be produced 
by the direct, mystic, alogial and miraculous ac- 
tion of an invasive God on our soul, or only in- 
directly by the ordered immanence of an emerging 
God, which is shared by the whole world as the 
area of his high causation." 

The course of events has magnified the meaning 
and broadened the scope of those key words, "We 



18 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

must decide." Here is no abstruse question in 
metaphysics, to be decided by cloistered saints, 
but a tragically practical question, to be decided 
by a church in action. The very unity for which 
we pray will compel a decision, for that unity, 
to be effective, must be real and vital, not pre- 
tended. "You never can substitute rhetoric for 
reality without important results." And the 
world in chaos, needing deliverance, makes the 
option compulsory. The crucial question con- 
cerning the church to-day is not "Will she under- 
take the colossal task of attempting to furnish 
a solid foundation for the new social order?" but 
"How will she undertake it?" With vague senti- 
mentalizing and meaningless moral platitudes or 
with "faith's certainties," however unwelcome they 
may be to some on their sterner side? With a 
modernized paganism or a plan of salvation 
rooted in God's recorded revelation of himself 
and justified by historical experience? With a 
gospel of social duty or a gospel of individual 
regeneration? With the comfortable assurance 
of a Universal Goodness or an urgent summons 
to choose between the narrow way that leads to 
life and the broad way that ends in spiritual 
death? With glittering generalities about a uni- 
versal "immortality" or the plain preaching of 
heaven, hell, and the Judgment? With a mess 
of twaddle about a "spirituality" that means any- 



"CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH" 19 

thing from aesthetic idealism to pleasurable nerv- 
ous reaction to fine weather or the sturdy an- 
nouncement of justification in its truest and most 
vital sense? With a Christ ideal, freed from all 
connection with God's recorded disclosure of him- 
self, or the passionate presentation of an histori- 
cal Jesus who is also the eternal Christ? With 
an offer to imperfect men of salvation by general 
moral improvement or an offer to lost and sinful 
men of salvation by faith in an atoning Saviour? 

That is the challenge of the church, as I see it. 
Nothing is to be gained by dismal Jeremiads con- 
cerning the result if the church fails to meet the 
issue squarely. "The course of events is apt to 
show itself humorously indifferent to the reputa- 
tion of prophets." But a brief appeal to history 
may be both illuminating and stimulating. 

The early years of the sixteenth century con- 
stituted the hideous climax to a long period of 
decadence in religion and morals. The whole 
thing had its roots in the wanton prostitution of 
the Christian doctrine and ethics. "In what 
passed for the Christian religion fearful abuses 
in practice and wretched corruptions in doctrine 
went hand in hand with superstitions that might 
well seem incredible." Martin Luther appealed to 
the church to meet the situation by cleansing her 
own Augean stables. His answer was abuse and 
persecution. In consequence the Protestant 



20 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

Reformation had its birth and the church was rent 
in twain. That movement, in its initial stages, 
was marred by serious blunders, but two things 
concerning it are worthy of note. The first is 
that it ushered in a new era in Christian history. 
The second is that, at its heart, it was a return 
to the New Testament as the source of doctrine 
and to salvation by faith as the basis of human 
hope. With all its faults Protestantism became 
dynamic because it was born of the doctrines of 
grace. 

The early years of the eighteenth century con- 
stituted a period of decadence in morals and reli- 
gion. In Great Britain a rotten church stood as 
the impotent bulwark of a rotten social order. 
Deism and debauchery went hand in hand in the 
church and out of it. One historian went so far 
as to say: "All that is restrictively Christian or 
that is peculiar to Christ is waived and banished 
and despised." An ordained priest in the Estab- 
lished Church was given the supreme blessing of 
a conscious experience of Jesus Christ as his 
Saviour. A heart strangely warmed resulted in 
a personality made colossal. True to the last to 
the church of which he was a part, he besought 
her to sanctify herself in teaching and in practice. 
Her answer was to close her doors in his face and 
refuse his unlovely converts a place at her altars. 
Then, and then only, the Wesleyan revival became 



"CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH" 21 

a separatist movement, and the Church of Eng- 
land lived to mourn the fact that she had been so 
shortsighted. Concerning that movement two 
things are to be noted. The first is that it changed 
the channel of Christian history. The second is 
that it was a return to the supernatural content 
of the New Testament and the supernatural ele- 
ment in Christian experience. To the barrenness 
of deism and the partialism of Calvinistic theology 
John Wesley opposed the vast truths of free grace 
and salvation by faith, and to a formal and un- 
ethical religion he opposed the conscious experi- 
ence of peace with God by faith in Jesus Christ. 

The early years of the twentieth century con- 
stituted a period of decadence in morals and reli- 
gion. Alfred Russel Wallace went so far as to 
write, "It is not too much to say that our whole 
system of society is rotten from top to bottom 
and the social environment as a whole, in relation 
to our possibilities and claims, is the worst that 
the world has ever seen." That period was 
marked by a growing movement outside the church 
toward the rejection of all religion and a growing 
movement inside the church toward a rejection 
of historical Christianity. Just before he died 
Brierley recovered from his exceeding optimism, 
conceded the seriousness of the situation, and said 
that the whole thing was due to the loss from the 
church of "the essence, the soul, the root of the 



22 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

evangelical gospel." That had gone and with it 
the spiritual dynamic and conquering faith of 
Protestant Christianity. Therefore, said that 
keen student of contemporaneous history, the only 
way to recover that lost power and save the world 
from irretrievable disaster is for the church to 
retrace her steps. "The things, the powers by 
which our fathers won back England to religion 
are there intact and need only to be used to win 
a new victory." Whether or not we agree with 
Brierley as to the exact content of that essential 
gospel is aside from the question. The fact re- 
mains that once more, in a time of crisis and 
trial, the Church of God has been told which direc- 
tion she must take to recover her own spiritual 
health and to minister effectively to a world in 
moral chaos. Nobody wants a return to outworn 
dogmas or a bootless attempt to resuscitate long 
dead formulae. Everybody realizes that the gospel, 
to be effective, must be restated in terms of life 
and made manifest by an experience charged with 
reality. But again the Church of God can go 
forward only by going back to Calvary and to 
him who accomplished death thereon, to the soul 
of the New Testament doctrine and experience. 

Will the church be wise enough to learn by her 
own mistakes? Will she see the crossroads at 
which she stands once more and choose the Via 
Dolorosa? Will her leaders remain unmoved by 



"CHALLENGE OF THE CHURCH" 23 

the sloppy sentimentalism that threatens to engulf 
the whole race and the inane demands for the 
destruction of all dogma? Will they, with fear- 
less unconcern as to consequences and a pas- 
sionate manifestation of the Christ's spirit, pro- 
claim to all mankind, soldier and civilian, intel- 
lectualist, social idealist and plain John Smith, 
Jesus Christ as the Saviour from sin and the high 
privilege of salvation by vital faith in him? Not 
with "a zeal for pure doctrine," but with that 
holier mood, "the passion for saving faith," will 
the Church of God move steadily forward to the 
dual goal of vital Christian unity and world vie- 
tory for our Redeeming Lord? I do not know. 
Nobody knows. But I do know that, though 
history does not repeat itself, it does furnish some 
striking parallels. 



CHAPTER II 
OF TRYING TO BE A CHRISTIAN 



I beseech you, in the Lord Jesus, beware of unsound work 
in the matter of your salvation. Strike hands with Christ, 
that thereafter there may be no happiness to you but Christ, 
no hunting for anything but Christ, no bed at night, when 
death cometh, but Christ. — Samuel Rutherford. 

Not many weeks intervened when I awoke from a sound 
sleep at break of day, conscious that I was a Christian. That 
was fifty-six years ago. From that time to this, Jesus Christ 
has been my personal Saviour. — Jacob Mills, in a personal 
letter to the author. 

The very first pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly 
apprehend its significance, is the indication that the division 
between the Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal 
has become real, that the finite has reached its goal and be- 
come suffused with the presence and life of the Infinite. — 
Principal Caird. 

This mighty life of God in the soul does not, however, work 
as a blind force, compelling us ignorantly or involuntarily to 
act like Christ. On the contrary, the walking like him must 
come as the result of a deliberate choice, sought in strong 
desire, accepted of a living will. — Andrew Murray. 

To become a Christian is to have a new spiritual life enter 
the human soul, as when a seed with its living germ is planted 
in the soil. To grow as a Christian is to have this new life, 
the very life of Christ in us, increase in strength and energy, 
expelling the evil of the old nature by the force of its own 
good, and ultimately bringing the affections, the thoughts, 
the purposes, all the activities of the soul into conformity to 
Christ. The Christian, in a word, is born, not made. — J. Le 
Moyne Danner. 



CHAPTER II 
OF TRYING TO BE A CHRISTIAN 

Is there such a thing as "trying to be a Chris- 
tian," or, as it is usually put, "trying to lead the 
Christian life" ? Usage answers in the affirmative, 
for the expression is common, in both the inter- 
rogative and declarative forms. One cannot 
travel far in a distinctly religious environment 
without hearing some men asked if they will try 
to be Christians and others account for themselves 
by saying that they are trying. And modern 
thought would seem to sanction the usage, for 
the gospel as preached to-day is preeminently a 
call to service. Christianity is looked upon as 
a program of social readjustments, an ethical 
ideal to be attained. Even our own church asks 
of the candidate for admission, "Will you en- 
deavor to lead a holy life?" And the candidate 
is expected to answer, "I will endeavor so to do, 
the Lord being my helper." 

The question as included in the church ritual 
is scripturally correct and eminently wise, for it 
is but another form of that which Henry Drum- 
mond so persistently put to the students at Edin- 

n 



28 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

burgh — "Gentlemen, do you mean business ?" But 
the phrase, especially as used by so many to 
explain this relation to God and his kingdom, 
may well arouse suspicion and provoke inquiry. 

It is significant that the New Testament makes 
use of no term or combination of terms which can 
be so translated. Jesus never asked anybody to 
try to follow him and had scant courtesy for those 
who suggested a discipleship falling short of com- 
plete self-renunciation. Furthermore, by repeated 
statement and insistent emphasis, he made it clear 
that the Christian life is not merely an ideal to 
be attained, but an inner spiritual transforma- 
tion to be experienced. To use his own symbol 
(flung at a philosopher who came to him as to 
an authoritative teacher of an exalted ethic), it 
is a spiritual rebirth, the making of a mortal into 
an immortal by the power of the Holy Spirit. It 
is true that this change is elsewhere called "con- 
version," a turning around, thus emphasizing the 
fact that there is a human as well as a divine 
element in the transaction, but even that means 
primarily not a changed course of conduct, but 
a changed attitude toward God. It means love 
instead of indifference or hate, faith instead of 
unbelief, submission instead of rebellion. 

In this, as in all else, the Acts and the Epistles 
are in perfect accord with the Gospels. When 
those who were cut to the heart on the day of 



OF TRYING TO BE A CHRISTIAN 29 

Pentecost cried, "What shall we do?" Peter re- 
plied in no uncertain terms: "Repent and be 
baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus 
Christ, unto the remission of sins, and ye shall 
receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Whether 
approaching the matter from the legal or the 
biological standpoint, Paul's conclusion is always 
the same: "By grace are ye saved, through faith, 
and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God." 
Drawing a line of demarcation which must be dis- 
concerting to the scoffer at the "twice-born" 
throng, John says, "He that hath the Son hath 
the life." The solemn warnings in the Epistle to 
the Hebrews are to the end that believers shall 
stop shilly-shallying and make ultimate salvation 
absolutely sure by unwavering faith in and devo- 
tion to him who made atonement for their sins. 
And even James, in all his talk about works, is 
but emphasizing the fact that a man's faith must 
be vital, or his so-called Christianity is but de- 
spicable hypocrisy. 

Of course there are passages aplenty affirming 
that man's part in this divine-human transaction 
is active as well as passive, that the Christian 
life is a pilgrimage as well as a possession, that 
there is hard fighting all along the road, and that 
many who start bravely fail to reach the goal, 
but all such are complementary and not contra- 
dictory to the truth as already stated. Jesus' 



30 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

solemn advice to "strive to enter in at the strait 
gate" is but a much-needed warning that only he 
who is so dead in earnest about salvation and 
discipleship that everything else becomes as noth- 
ing can hope to become a Christian at all. In 
other words, the second birth differs from the 
first in that it is voluntary and that the one born 
must often travail and suffer agony. The state- 
ment, "He that shall endure unto the end, the 
same shall be saved," is but one of a multitude 
of assertions that salvation, in the case of the 
Christian, is not only past but future and that 
victory is not assured until the spirit sloughs off 
the flesh. Saint Paul's injunction to "work out 
your own salvation," is a reminder that individual 
salvation has vast social implications, and the 
apostle does not pause until he reminds his readers 
further that, even in the carrying out of that 
task, "it is God that worketh in you both to will 
and to do of his good pleasure." And those 
puissant promises to the overcomer, contained in 
the Apocalypse, are made to him who meets life's 
tests, not as a poor mortal, trying to climb "the 
steep and thorny road to heaven," but as "a new 
creature" in Christ Jesus, strengthened by the 
resistless might of an unconquerable God. 

I know of nobody who has put this truth more 
succinctly than did Principal Caird, in his Intro- 
duction to the Philosophy of Religion. He says : 



OF TRYING TO BE A CHRISTIAN 31 

"Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind 
and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, 
but its very beginning and birth in the soul. . . . 
It is true indeed that the religious life is pro- 
gressive ; but, understood in the light of the fore- 
going idea, religious progress is not toward y but 
within the sphere of the infinite." 

In all this there is more than a splitting of 
hairs or the making of a distinction without a 
difference. The modern change of emphasis from 
Christianity as a mystical something which Jesus 
Christ wrought for and works in man to Chris- 
tianity as a something or series of somethings 
which man does for God has not proved an un- 
mixed blessing. To use a trite phrase, a crying 
need of this crucial time is the certainty that 
springs from a definite faith and the victory 
born of a conscious spiritual experience. Popular 
opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, there 
is a definite line of cleavage between the Christian 
and the non-Christian. A man is in the kingdom 
of God or he is not. He has accepted Jesus Christ 
as his Master or he still belongs to the devil. At 
first he may be a "carnal" Christian, as Saint 
Paul says, but he is nevertheless a Christian. He 
may fall again and again in his conflict with 
tyrannical habits, as did Jerry McAuley, but 
if he repent and believe, he will rise again and 
become "more than conqueror." 



32 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

Moreover, a man becomes a Christian, not by 
"trying," but by believing, by repentance and 
faith. "This is the work of God, that ye believe 
on him whom he hath sent." It is necessary to 
bring forth fruits meet for repentance, but it is 
first necessary to repent. When Charles G. 
Finney went about among those who were seeking 
God, he asked not, "Will you try?" but "Have 
you surrendered?" Man's first victory over self 
and the world is capitulation to God. It is of 
more than passing significance that, in Bunyan's 
immortal allegory, the beginning of Christian's 
journey as "pilgrim of the infinite" was marked 
by the passage through the strait gate and the 
rolling away of his burden at the foot of the cross. 

Making every concession to native humility and 
the wisdom of urging the discouraged and fallen 
to "try again," it is well to remember that "un- 
discourageable faith" is the only basis of spiritual 
recovery and assurance of ultimate victory. "I 
am trying to be a Christian" smells too strongly 
of a discipleship with mental reservations or a 
timidity that spells defeat. "This is the victory 
that overcometh the world, even our faith." Saint 
John did not write, "we are trying," but "we 
know," and "now are we the sons of God." Saint 
Paul did not say, "I am trying." He said, "I 
am crucified with Christ," and "I can do all things 
through Christ which strengtheneth me." 



OF TRYING TO BE A CHRISTIAN 33 

For years John Wesley tried to live the Chris- 
tian life. By fasting and prayer he endeavored 
to find peace and he touched two continents in 
his efforts to do the will of God. Both prayers 
and labors seemed fruitless, for he found no rest 
and accomplished but little. But then came that 
memorable meeting of the Moravians during which 
he felt his heart strangely warmed and attained 
the consciousness that he had passed from death 
into life. Whether or not you accept the state- 
ment that that experience constituted his real con- 
version, certain historical facts cannot be gain- 
said. From that day unutterable peace filled his 
heart and almost unparalleled results marked his 
ministry. He became a preacher of extraordinary 
power, the leader of a new Reformation, a Chris- 
tian statesman of astonishing wisdom and fore- 
sight, God's chosen agent in the accomplishment 
of untold good. 

I cannot help thinking of an incident which 
occurred in the West some years ago. A secre- 
tary of the Young Men's Christian Association 
was talking with a prominent young business man 
about the things of the Spirit, and at last asked 
him point blank if he would not become a Chris- 
tian. 

"Well, I'll try," answered the young man. 

"I don't want you to try," said the secretary; 
"I want you to trust." 



34 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

His companion saw the difference at once. 
Realizing that there is a vast difference between 
the endeavor to attain an ideal and the opening 
of one's heart by faith to the operative influences 
of the Spirit of God, he "surrendered," committed 
his all to a faithful Creator, and became a Chris- 
tian man of marked spiritual power and wide 
influence. 



CHAPTER III 

SHALL THE SEVERITY OF GOD BE 
PREACHED? 



The motive of fear plays no such part with us as it did with 
our fathers. But it has its place, even though a small one. 
As to allowing it in this present life but disallowing it as to 
the future, it can only be said that such a distinction is ut- 
terly unreasonable. If it is right for a man to remember 
that to-day's sin will bring its penalty to-morrow, it is right 
for him to remember that the same principle reaches on into 
the future life. Of course there is such a thing as craven and 
contemptible fear. But as a matter of fact few people will 
shun sin for fear of future punishment who do not also shun 
it on other and stronger grounds. But all men have both a 
right and a duty to consider the consequences of sin and of 
righteousness. — Robert E. Speer. 

If we imagine that this change (from royal to parental au- 
thority) detracts from the seriousness of the relation in which 
men stand to God, we have not understood the Master. The 
holiness of God is scarcely mentioned in direct terms in the 
gospel, but is the underlying fact of all that Jesus said. It 
is always both implied and apparent that God is all pure, 
that sin is contrary to his nature and will, and that to him 
men in their sinfulness are responsible. Above all others, 
Jesus has made God known as the enemy of sin in the world. 
Above all others, he has taught how terrible a thing it is to 
cast in one's lot with sin and identify oneself with its destiny, 
and all because God is what he is. His reproofs of selfishness, 
insincerity, heartlessness, falseness before God and wrong 
toward men, are unparalleled in their severity. His warn- 
ings of doom to those who persist in evil have burned them- 
selves into the memory and convictions of Christendom. 
The holiness of the Father is as terrible to an evil will as it is 
glorious and lovely to the loyal heart. — William Newton 
Clarke. 



CHAPTER III 

SHALL THE SEVERITY OF GOD BE 
PREACHED? 

In an article entitled "Methodism Fifty Years 
Ago and Now," published in the Methodist Re- 
view of September-October, 1917, Dr. Tuttle 
says: "Methodists fifty years ago persistently 
preached the terrors of the Judgment and an 
eternal hell. Probably all our preachers still re- 
tain their belief in the dreadful consequences of 
unrepented sin continuing beyond the grave. They 
would not expunge the doctrine from our stand- 
ards of faith. But most of them have laid it away 
in the attic of their intellect, an antiquated 
memory of the olden times, to be brought out 
occasionally for exhibition. Very few of our 
pulpits are blackened with the smoke or scented 
with the brimstone of a fiery hell." 

That is an absolutely correct statement of fact. 
The pulpits of the Methodist Episcopal Church 
are silent on those solemn themes, and so are 
the pulpits of all Methodism and of all the other 
evangelical churches. The reaction from Calvin- 
ism is complete. The leaven of the preaching of 
Freeman, Channing, Ripley, and Parker has 



38 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

leavened the whole lump, and "a more liberal 
spirit" now saturates the orthodox churches. One 
might widen the horizon and, without fear of con- 
tradiction, affirm that the intellectual movement 
which has wrought this startling change is a part 
of or closely related to another which has swung 
the emphasis of both preaching and thinking 
from the future to the present. Until recently, 
at least, the mind of Christendom has been so 
concentrated on "the life that now is" as to 
obliterate any serious thought about "the life 
that is to come." Modern preaching shows it. 
Our hymn books show it. Literature shows it. 
In the words of a writer in the Atlantic, "Mediaeval 
Christianity certainly went mad over heaven and 
hell; but who now neglects Demeter's green earth 
for apocalyptic visions?" It would seem, how- 
ever, as if the time were ripe for a serious study 
of the situation to which Dr. Tuttle has called 
attention. The case of the unorthodox or non- 
orthodox preacher is simple. He does not preach 
the Judgment Day and an eternal hell simply 
because he does not believe in them. But the 
case of the orthodox presents complications. 
Why is he persistently silent about things in 
which he still believes? Why has he relegated 
to the attic of his intellect certain truths (I 
do not think of them as doctrines) which consti- 
tute an integral part of revelation as he knows it? 



THE SEVERITY OF GOD 39 

To say that the people are not interested in them 
has no bearing. Most of "the people" are not 
interested in God or the salvation of their own 
souls. The prophesying of smooth things is not 
the business of the true prophet. Such a silence 
can have only two satisfactory explanations: 
either the preaching of "the terrors of the Judg- 
ment and an eternal hell" is not authorized or it is 
not essential. In other words, it is not included 
in the divine commission to "preach the gospel" 
or it is not necessary in the work of bringing men 
to repentance and righteousness. Of course the 
difference between those two things is rhetorical 
rather than real, but it will help in our thinking 
to approach the matter from those two angles. 

The New Testament still constitutes the 
preacher's most fruitful field and safest monitor 
in his homiletical work. After all the construc- 
tive results of the historico-critical method have 
been conceded and the proof-text method dis- 
carded as obsolete, the Bible, and especially that 
part of it which contains the record of God's 
revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, remains to 
the preacher a lamp unto his feet and a light 
unto his path. Studied prayerfully, it not only 
helps him more than anything else in the world 
in his eager search after truth, but it also guides 
him in the problem of emphasis in the presentation 
of that truth. I always have believed and always 



40 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

will believe that any historical fact or aspect of 
the truth which is given scant consideration there 
need not be emphasized in creed or sermon, and, 
by the same token, one that is writ large on those 
inspired pages may safely be given great emphasis 
and importance in the proclamation of the "good 
news." If that is conceded, it becomes apparent 
that the modern evangelical preacher is guilty of 
the very crime of which the Christian Scientist 
and the Unitarian are accused, namely, the dis- 
torting of the truth by making use of a carefully 
expurgated edition of the New Testament. We 
have here no teaching whose validity is based 
upon one or two obscure verses of Scripture. The 
outstanding fact about the body of inspired lit- 
erature, without which the preacher would become 
a mere lecturer, is not that it contains so many 
texts which make use of the word translated hell, 
or so many which refer to the Judgment Day; 
it is not even that Jesus proclaimed the doom of 
the persistently rebellious in terms more terrible 
than those flung by the relentless Edwards at the 
heads of cowering sinners, or that in its presenta- 
tion of the wrath of God the Apocalypse surpasses 
the picturesque vehemence of Billy Sunday: it is 
that the whole New Testament is a continuous 
series of contrasts between the blessedness of 
righteousness and the misery of sin, the splendor 
of Eternal Day and the horror of the "outer 



THE SEVERITY OF GOD 41 

darkness." If you are looking for the "trend 
of Scripture," there it is. The modern preacher 
may keep silent about the dark side of human 
life and destiny, but the Master Preacher and 
that band of intrepid men who turned the world 
upside down did not. He who breathed "Come 
unto me" also cried "Woe unto thee." The 
"wrath of the Lamb" and "the blood of the Lamb" 
are both Scripture phrases. The parable of the 
prodigal son and the parable of Dives and Laza- 
rus lie side by side. The promise of "rest" to 
those who die in the Lord is followed by the ter- 
rible statement concerning the finally lost that 
"they have no rest day nor night." The same 
epistle which exalts the sacrificial Saviourhood 
of Jesus bristles with statements of the irrep- 
arable harm that awaits the unrepentant and 
apostate. Out from the same pages where glow 
the repeated assurance that "God is love" blaze 
the repeated announcements, in one form or an- 
other, that "our God is a consuming fire." The 
same commission which enjoins the preacher to 
comfort bids him also warn, and it would be only 
a waste of time to ask, "Warn of what?" Verily 
the Word of God is a two-edged sword. 

In considering the question as to the effects 
of preaching the severity of God there are two 
sources of information: the findings of the psy- 
chologists and the pages of church history. Both 



42 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

are accessible to him who would know. The stock 
argument against such preaching is that it is an 
appeal to fear, and that the appeal to fear is 
psychologically wrong and spiritually injurious. 
The temptation arises to answer, "Then the New 
Testament is a blunder from the scientific stand- 
point"; but it is manifestly better to approach 
the matter with directness. When the doctors 
disagree seek out the one who really ought to 
know and believe what he tells you. And who 
knows more about psychology than William 
James? Yet he says: 

"Great passions annul the ordinary inhibitions 
set by conscience, and, conversely, of all the 
criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, 
sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there 
is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may 
not be at some moment overpowered by the pres- 
ence of some other emotion to which his character 
is also potentially liable, provided that other 
emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is 
usually the most available for this result in this 
particular class of persons. It stands for con- 
science, and may here be classed appropriately 
as a 'higher affection. 5 

"// we are soon to die, or if we believe a Day 
of Judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do 
we put our moral house in order — we do not see 
how sin can evermore exert temptation over us. 



THE SEVERITY OF GOD 43 

"Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew 
how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the 
way of fruits for repentance, and its full conver- 
sion value." 

The italics are mine, used to emphasize the 
fact that, as he proceeds, the eminent psychologist 
and student of spiritual experience widens the 
scope of his statement and makes fear, or the 
aroused consciousness of infinite peril, an integral 
factor in the regeneration of all classes of men. 
"We" are moved by the same appeal, aroused 
by the same complex emotions, and induced to 
"get right with God" by being brought face to 
face with the same grim realities as is the trans- 
gressor of the laws of organized society. The 
fact that certain temperaments shrink from the 
emphasis of the tragic and terrible, and react 
only to the manifest mercy of the Father, proves 
nothing to the contrary. 

If the doubter still remains doubtful, and re- 
fuses to believe on the testimony of one witness, 
let him read Beecher, that inveterate optimist, 
on "Through Fear to Love," and Horace Bush- 
nell on "One Chance Better than Many," and 
Harold Begbie's Twice Born Men, that clinic in 
regeneration which thrilled a discouraged church 
a decade ago. Or let him turn to a larger and 
later volume — that of life itself — and find how 
the blasphemous and indifferent, the men who 



44 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

have been unmoved by the "gentle" appeals of "a 
more liberal spirit," were in multitudes of cases 
brought to themselves and to Christ by visions 
of death and the hereafter burned into their souls 
in the first-line trenches. After all has been said 
about the soldiers disliking the preaching of 
heaven and hell, the fact remains that they re- 
acted to religion in a situation where the horrors 
of hell were made more real to them than ever 
before. A whole race who had forgotten death 
were made to feel not only the reality but the 
cruciality of death. 

More than any abstract reasoning or scientific 
theorizing, that blazing inferno called the world 
war has proved beyond peradventure that if men 
are to be saved, they must be brought face to 
face with and be made to feel the grim and terrible 
as well as the pleasant and glorious realities. 

In the words of the doughty (though now 
antique) Joseph Cook, "God cannot be an 
enswathing kiss without also being a consuming 
fire," and the only appeal to which the generality 
of men will react must emphasize that fact. 

The testimony of history, to be adequately 
cited, requires thorough treatment. In order to 
keep the present treatment within the limits of 
prudence only the general statement can be made, 
leaving the reader to challenge or confirm. Here 
it is: every great Christian age and every vital 



THE SEVERITY OF GOD 45 

spiritual revival in Christian history has had at 
its heart the belief in and emphasis of the Judg- 
ment and eternal consequences of continued sin, 
and, conversely, the periods marked by moral and 
spiritual decadence have been periods when the 
pulpit has been silent about, and the people have 
ceased to believe vitally in, the fact that "because 
of these things cometh the wrath of God upon 
the children of disobedience." 

"Petrarch said that the court of the popes at 
Avignon was a place where the hope of heaven and 
the fear of hell were regarded as old fables, where 
virtue was esteemed an affair for peasants, and 
sin was regarded as a sign of manly independ- 
ence." And if at times the horrors of eternal 
alienation from God have been dwelt upon even 
more than the bliss of his presence, what theology 
lost in sweetness the saints seem to have gained 
in strength. The preaching of those first Chris- 
tian centuries, and of Savonarola during the 
cleansing of Florence, and of the Protestant 
Reformation, and of Calvin on the continent and 
Knox in Scotland, and of the Wesleyan re- 
vival under the Wesleys and Whitefield, and of 
the revivals in America under Edwards and 
Finney and Moody and Billy Sunday — the preach- 
ing of those great movements and great leaders 
has differed in many ways, but every bit of it has 
been marked to a greater or less degree by one 



46 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

thing — the insistent, persistent declaration that 
every man must give an account of himself to 
Almighty God for the deeds done in the body, and 
that he who faces the future without faith in and 
fidelity to Jesus Christ the Saviour is but commit- 
ting his own soul to the black darkness of spiritual 
death. No preaching that minimizes or is silent 
about man's responsibility to God and the eternal 
consequences of sin has ever brought about a wide- 
spread revival of religion or led humanity to the 
heroic heights of abandonment to the will of God. 
It is a significant thing that Protestantism had 
its beginning not merely in the revolt of the monk 
Martin Luther against the cheapening of salvation 
by a corrupt church, but in the fleeing of the man 
Martin Luther from the miseries of hell, both 
present and prospective, to the cross of Christ 
for deliverance. 

It seems to me that the conclusion is self-evi- 
dent. The present silence of the Protestant pul- 
pit on the solemn themes of hell and the Judgment 
is a reaction from hyper-Calvinism. All reactions 
tend toward extremes and all extremes are preg- 
nant of disaster. From the tyranny of a despot 
to the tyranny of the mob; from bald literalism 
to destructive higher criticism; from the excesses 
of emotionalism to the devitalized calm of intel- 
lectualism; from dogmatism to skepticism; from 
the rack and thumb screw to an easy-going toler- 



THE SEVERITY OF GOD 47 

ance born of indifference; from "mid- Victorian" 
prudery to the mad nastiness of the early twen- 
tieth century — those are a few of the chapters 
in the history of human progress. And this is 
like unto the rest. The pendulum has again swung 
to the end of the arc. If Jonathan Edwards and 
his frightful sermon on "Sinners in the Hands 
of an Angry God" represent one extreme, the 
modern preacher, with the doctrine of "the dread- 
ful consequences of unrepented sin continuing 
beyond the grave" laid carefully away in the attic 
of his intellect, may well represent the other. 
And the last state of the pulpit is at least as bad 
as the first. If the preacher of the gospel has 
no moral right to "put the devil on the throne and 
call him God," neither has he any right to let 
mankind think of God as a magnified and over- 
indulgent parent, who winks blandly at all forms 
of wrong. It would not be fair to assume that 
this silence in the pulpit is the cause of so much 
spiritual superficiality in the pews, or even sug- 
gest that it bears any causal relation to the moral 
rottenness which brought our boasted civilization 
down with such a tragic crash. But it is fair 
to remind ourselves that these conditions happen 
to be contemporaneous, and to recollect Carlyle's 
striking words, "When belief waxes uncertain 
then practice too becomes unsound." And to the 
thoughtful man there will come those disturbing 



48 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

words from Jeremiah, "They have healed also the 
hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, say- 
ing, Peace, peace, when there is no peace." No 
sane man would advocate a return to the religion 
of the November fog, whose chief function, as 
Brierley put it, is the exhalation of gloom. No 
one wants preaching that appeals to fear, and 
that alone. The Christianity which "walks in 
worried morality" is gone and never ought to 
come back. But thoughtful men, I believe, can 
already see the need of that balanced preaching 
which drives home to the consciousness both the 
severity and the goodness of God, the wages of 
sin as well as the gift of God, the horrors of hell 
and the glories of heaven as well as the call to 
social service. Then, and only then, will men 
be rid of their fatuous illusions and realize that 
now is the accepted time, now is the day of salva- 
tion. Then, and then only, can we even hope 
for the first faint beginnings of a new heaven and 
a new earth. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF NEUTRALITY 



Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too 
often regarded as so true that they lose all the power of truth 
and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side 
with the most despised and exploded errors.— Coleridge. 

The essence of unbelief is not the denial of the truth, but 
refusal to treat the truth as true. . . . We are not measured 
by the truths that we deny, but by the truths that, recog- 
nizing, we still are practically ignoring. — Henry Churchill King, 

The alternatives are strictly limited and exclusive. Men 
try to play with both, but it is a futile game. Our Lord al- 
ways insisted that at bottom every man was ruled by one or 
the other of two contradictory principles. He allowed for 
black and white, goats and sheep — no neutral tints, no hy- 
brids. However hard it is for us to slice society in two, Jesus 
says it will be done at the Judgment. There will be two 
groups, not twenty, and every man is in one or the other of 
these two groups now. — Robert E. Speer. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF NEUTRALITY 

It took some good people a long time to dis- 
cover that mental neutrality toward the titanic 
struggle called the world war was not a virtue, 
but a vice. In fact, it was impossible to a man 
of conscience because the issues involved were not 
material, but moral. As Agnes Repplier says, in 
her remarkable essay on "War and the Child," 
"The absence of decided views, feeling, or expres- 
sion sounds, when matters of vital importance are 
at stake, like a contradiction in terms." 

How long will it take men to realize that in the 
unending conflict between God and the devil, good 
and evil, neutrality is absolutely impossible? In 
this war, even more than in that, every man is, 
by necessity, on one side or the other, not only 
in sympathy and interest, but also in influence 
and active participation. The Christian aspect 
of the situation was stated, briefly and bluntly, by 
Jesus Christ himself, when he said, "He that is 
not for me is against me." In other words, the 
postponement of decision concerning one's rela- 
tion to Christ and his work, by means of which 
51 



52 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

so many men imagine that they hold the matter 
in abeyance, is nothing more nor less than decision 
for the devil. Indecision, that fatal weakness of 
the double-minded, is not merely a negative weak- 
ness ; it is a positive contribution to the sum total 
of evil. Indifference is a personal sin and apathy 
a spiritual crime against society, and inactivity 
is, in its final result, activity on the wrong side. 
There is something ethically significant as well as 
historically dramatic in that part of the song of 
Deborah and Barak which runs, "Curse ye Meroz, 
said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the 
inhabitants thereof ; because they came not to the 
help of the Lord, the help of the Lord against the 
mighty." The sin of Meroz consisted in doing 
nothing when vital issues were at stake. 

Approaching the matter from the side of the 
individual and his own personal faith or non-faith, 
James says : "If a thinker had no stake in the un- 
known, no vital needs, to live or languish accord- 
ing to what the unseen world contained, a philo- 
sophic neutrality and refusal to believe either 
one way or the other would be his wisest cue. 
But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only in- 
wardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, 
where our relations to an alternative are practical 
and vital. This is because, as the psychologists 
tell us, belief and doubts are living attitudes, and 
involve conduct on our part." And then, ap- 



IMPOSSIBILITY OF NEUTRALITY 53 

proaching it from the side of conduct, he says, 
"There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life 
when inaction is a kind of action, and when 
not to be for is to be practically against; and in 
all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is 
an unattainable thing." There you have the 
truth in both realms, in that of belief and in that 
of life. In both, man is presented with a forced 
option. He must choose, whether he will or not, 
and he does choose, whether or not he has a clear 
realization of that fact. 

The two most striking examples in modern 
history of this compulsion to choice, realized and 
acted upon, the one disastrously and the other 
triumphantly, are found in the lives of Aaron 
Burr and Wendell Phillips. Brought face to face 
with God by an awakened conscience and made 
to see that he must decide the matter of his atti- 
tude toward God once and forever, the young and 
brilliant grandson of Jonathan Edwards went 
into seclusion for a week, fought the question to 
a finish, and decided that he would not surrender. 
How, as a result, he became one of the conspicu- 
ously infamous figures in the annals of American 
history and became the willing agent of evil in 
daring ways, is a matter of common knowledge. 
When a boy of fourteen, Wendell Phillips heard 
Lyman Beecher on the theme, "You Belong to 
God." As he, himself, puts it, "I went home after 



54 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

that service, threw myself on the floor in my room 
with locked doors, and prayed: 'O God, I belong 
to thee; take what is thine own. I ask this, that 
whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power 
of temptation over me; and whenever a thing be 
right it may take no courage to do it. 5 " That 
prayer was not answered just as he expected, for 
it must have taken vast courage to do many of 
the things he was called upon to do. But it was 
answered in that he became, as a result of that 
decision, one of the most useful and influential 
Christian leaders, not only in abolishing slavery, 
but also in establishing democracy on a righteous 
foundation. 

In the trying days in which we are living this 
inevitable alternative is being given the deepest 
and most tragic significance. Those who thought 
the end of the war would mean the end of the 
moral and spiritual conflict, found themselves 
sleeping in a fool's paradise. The war was only 
the beginning. As Johnston-Ross states it, it was 
an episode in a drama of incalculable significance. 
It was the opening skirmish in a fight to a finish 
between the forces of good and evil, and that 
fight cannot be averted by the distinguished gen- 
tlemen sitting about the peace table at Paris. 
Social reconstruction is already being found to 
be neither automatic nor easy. While the con- 
flict of armies was still raging, a far-seeing 



IMPOSSIBILITY OF NEUTRALITY 55 

philosopher warned us to look out for one of the 
violent moral reactions that always follow periods 
of exalted emotion and heroic action. The chroni- 
clers of contemporaneous history are already 
busy registering the pathetic evidences of the 
fulfillment of his prophecy. An American resi- 
dent in Paris writes to a friend these meaningful 
sentences: "As time passes, we begin to §ee more 
and more that we are looking on at a scene where 
the play of every passion, be it good, bad, or 
indifferent, is having its effect on the general 
result. Every one, from the purest altruism down 
through the scale to the meanest selfishness, has 
its part in the mise en scene. In spite of the note 
of the Golden Rule, which is sounded in as well 
as out of season, it is plainly manifest that there 
are continental, national, racial, tribal, and per- 
sonal axes to be ground in the baggage of more 
than one of the representatives with us, and that 
the world's grindstone will be freely requisitioned 
to put an edge on all of them before the sword of 
justice will be so sharpened that the era of peace 
on earth, for which everybody, save a respectable 
number of unregenerate Huns, is longing, will be 
anything other than a Utopian dream." 

Add to that the social revolution which is rag- 
ing in Russia, Germany, and Austria, and fast 
spreading to every corner of the world. Add to 
that the fact, not yet clearly grasped by the many, 



56 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

that the social radicals the world over not only 
deride every suggestion that personal virtue has 
anything to do with social progress, but also 
laugh at the idea of God and plan the extermina- 
tion of all religion. And then add to that the 
equally significant fact that there is a widespread 
and determined attempt to substitute "the half 
truths and false psychology of popular altruism" 
for the austere simplicity and exacting ethic of 
the Christian religion. 

There is nothing to be gained by an elaborate 
discussion of the relation of these stupendous 
events to prophecy. Whether the world conflict 
was or was not Armageddon has no bearing on the 
case. But it is imperative to relate the whole 
situation to conduct and character, to faith and 
practice. 

The fact to be noted is that in that stupendous 
struggle between heaven and hell there will be 
no such thing as neutrality. The taking of no 
side will be equivalent to taking the wrong side. 
Indecision will be enlistment under the black flag 
of Satanic enterprise and inactivity will be trea- 
son. It may be that once more it will cost to 
align oneself with the host of God, just as it cost 
in those first fiery centuries of the Christian era. 
If it does, the result will be beneficial. "We hold 
all too cheaply beliefs for which we are not called 
upon to suffer or die." Those were tremendous 



IMPOSSIBILITY OF NEUTRALITY 57 

and triumphant days when Saint Paul wrote to 
"my son Timothy," "Yea, and all that will to live 
godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." 
Every age in which the forces of good and evil 
have been clearly aligned, one against the other, 
has been an age of trial, but it has also been an 
age of triumph. In this time of revolution and 
upheaval the air will be cleared of all fogs and 
mists, it will be seen that every man must answer 
the question, "Who is on the Lord's side?" The 
Spirit of the conquering Christ will make plain 
to every open mind the fact that "He that is not 
for me is against me," and new and larger mean- 
ings for preacher and hearer will be given that 
age-old exhortation, "Choose ye this day whom 
ye will serve." 



CHAPTER V 
IF I WERE A YOUNG MINISTER 






It is possible for you and me, taking the facts of the spir- 
itual life, to declare them with as true a certainty as any 
preacher ever did, in what men called the "ages of faith." 
They are as true to-day as they ever were. Men are as ready 
to feel their truth. The spiritual nature of man, with all its 
needs, is just as real a thing, and Christ is just as truly and 
richly its satisfaction. — Phillips Brooks. 

There are few things that earnest men need more to make 
clear to themselves from the beginning of their lifework, than 
that they will have to fight for time to grow, for time to do 
solid enduring work, for time to do especially the particular 
definite piece of work which God has laid on their souls to do. 
— Henry Churchill King. 

Nothing makes up for a failure in preaching. The church 
of all denominations, if they are wise, will give themselves 
with increased zeal and devotion to the training of the Chris- 
tian ministry. Nor will any magnificence of ritual, or any 
musical attraction, or any lectures on secular subjects per- 
manently attract worshipers. It can be done only by Chris- 
tian preaching. — Robertson Nicol. 



CHAPTER V 
IF I WERE A YOUNG MINISTER 

Two of the most essential characteristics of a 
vital ministry are poise and perspective. To be 
able to see clearly what ought to be done and 
then, despite clamor and criticism, to hold steadily 
to the task of doing it — that power will enable 
even an ordinary man to bring extraordinary 
things to pass. It marks the difference between 
a builder and a putterer. And if ever that power 
was needed, it is needed now. The world is in 
eruption and nobody knows the end thereof. The 
only thing upon which men are agreed is that we 
cannot go back. Old things are passing away ; all 
things must become new. But what will be the 
effect of the new order of things upon organized 
Christianity ? Crowns and thrones are perishing ; 
kingdoms are waxing and waning with bewildering 
rapidity; but are we sure that "the church of 
Jesus constant will remain"? 

In short, what will this after-the-war world 
mean to the church — transformation or extirpa- 
tion ? That is the question asked by skeptic and 
believer alike. 

61 



62 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

The men who, more than any others, will deter- 
mine the answer are the young men in the Chris- 
tian ministry, for they will be in the thick of 
things during the long period of reconstruction. 
And they will answer it best by approaching the 
matter from the opposite angle and asking, 
"What can organized Christianity do for the new 
social order?" Our business is not to save the 
church, but to save the world. Jesus Christ is in 
charge of that enterprise and he has made it 
perfectly clear that it cannot be accomplished 
by any merely defensive campaign. Furthermore, 
he has furnished ample munitions of war and left 
adequate instructions in military strategy. 

Therefore, if I were a young minister, I would 
concentrate my energies on becoming a preacher, 
the best preacher that could be made out of the 
material in hand. The day of the ecclesiastical 
engineer has gone. That method of kingdom- 
building, along with many others, has been weighed 
in the balance and found wanting. Stripped of 
all illusions and brought face to face with the 
grim realities of life, death, and the beyond, a 
burdened and perplexed humanity wants the 
truth, and it is the minister's business to see that 
the truth is proclaimed. The British soldier's 
succinct statement, made before going "over the 
top," "It is all right to entertain me, but I want 
some one to tell me how to die," was the imperfect 



IF I WERE A YOUNG MINISTER 63 

voicing of the race's inarticulate need of 
prophets, for men who will speak with authority 
and tact of God and Christ and the soul's salva- 
tion. This is no time for the apostle to be serving 
tables. 

My message would be salvation by faith in an 
atoning Saviour and risen Lord, and no sneers 
of "the enlightened" or clamor of "the liberals" 
would cause me to change it one iota. A great 
deal of the talk about the new age needing a new 
message is arrant nonsense. Down at bottom the 
"new age" will be just like all other ages, made 
up of sinful men and women who need a Saviour, 
and no substitution of a "Christ ideal" for the 
historical Jesus can meet that need. Neither 
Hellenistic naturalism nor a creedless church, 
made up of those who believe anything or nothing, 
can save the world. "Christ crucified is unto the 
Greeks foolishness," now as in the day of Saint 
Paul, but unto them which are called, in every 
age, he is "the power of God and the wisdom of 
God." We may well stop confounding systems 
of theology with saving faith, but there is an 
irreducible minimum before which we must take 
our stand with the statement, "Thus far thou 
shalt go and no farther." The weakness of the 
modern church has not been bigotry or intolerant 
dogmatism, but "fog in theology" and vagueness 
in the pulpit. And what is needed in the new age 



64 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

is not a new message, but the old message of salva- 
tion by faith in the personal Saviour made vital 
by a pulpit and church both proclaiming and 
embodying its truth. As Henry Watterson put 
it: "Democracy is a side issue. If the world is 
to be saved after the war, it will be saved by 
Christianity, by Jesus Christ and him crucified" 
[The italics are mine.] 

I would make the primary purpose of my whole 
ministry the thorough conversion of individuals. 
In the case of children you may call the result 
"decision," for I have no desire to quibble over the 
question of their relation to the Kingdom. Along 
with the modern emphasis on the social implica- 
tions of the gospel has come a ministerial im- 
patience (often unconscious) at the age-old 
method of world salvation by the regeneration of 
individuals. Amid "the din of social reforms, 
political purgations, and all the clamorous, in- 
sistent things" of the past quarter of a century, 
the unobtrusive work of leading men to Christ 
one by one has seemed slow and ineffectual. It 
is significant, however, that that very change in 
emphasis from the mass to the individual, from 
social salvation by general uplift to social salva- 
tion by individual transformation, marks the 
difference between the Old Dispensation and the 
New. The longer Jesus's public ministry con- 
tinued, the more time he gave to the little handful 



IF I WERE A YOUNG MINISTER 65 

of men and women who were to "turn the world 
upside down." I would be a fool to discount the 
value of reforms and leadership in them as a 
constituent part of the minister's work, but I 
would be a bigger fool if I did not insist that his 
greatest and most far-reaching work is the leading 
of individuals into the life as it is in Christ, Get 
men soundly converted, really surrendered to 
God and transformed by his power, and you can 
trust them to become honest, just, and helpful 
in their multifarious relations with their fellow 
men. But scamp or neglect that work, ignore 
conversion as a basic element in world salvation, 
or take men into the church while they are still 
trying to serve two masters, and you can thunder 
away at social sins and tinker away at social 
problems until doomsday without achieving any 
lasting results. The old preacher in rural Eng- 
land who was rebuked because the total definite 
fruit of one year's work was the conversion of 
one boy really did a fair year's work because the 
conversion was thorough and the boy was Robert 
Moffat. 

In order to be an effective spiritual physician 
I would compel myself to constant intimacy with 
God and vital contact with men. Two of the 
perils of a settled pastorate in these complex 
times are that a man will be too busy to spend 
much time with God and too busy with impersonal 



66 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

matters to really touch the life of the people. 
And if the mediaeval ascetic went too far in one 
direction, the modern ministerial "good mixer" 
goes too far in the other. Popular opinion to the 
contrary notwithstanding, people do not want a 
mere "good fellow" in the pulpit or out of it. The 
demand for "reality" in the pulpit is nothing 
more nor less than the demand for a preacher 
who knows God so thoroughly through personal 
communion that he can speak with authority, 
and knows men so intimately through passionate 
interest and personal contact that he can speak 
with discernment. Like Jesus himself, the world 
wants an apostle who is "in the world but not of 
it," whose soul dwells with the Eternal in mystical 
spiritual detachment, but whose heart and mind 
and body are immersed in the task of doing good. 
Perfunctory preaching, however cultured, will not 
do. Perfunctory calling or slum work will not do. 
They want a ministry that has its roots in inti- 
mate oneness with God and flowers in that self- 
obliterating service which is redolent of honest 
interest and sacrificial love. Such a ministry 
was that of Samuel Rutherford and Fletcher of 
Madeley, of Hugh Price Hughes and Maltbie 
Babcock and Silvester Home. Such is that of 
Bishop Brent and Dan Crawford and Wilfred 
Grenfell and our own Helms of Boston, a ministry 
that answers to the full all that yearning of weak 



IF I WERE A YOUNG MINISTER 67 

and sorrowing and sinful and discouraged hearts 

for 

"The touch of human hands — 
Such care as was in Him 
Who walked in Galilee 
Beside the silver sea." 

In these days of multifarious ministerial calls 
and a highly complex ecclesiastical machinery 
that needs constant attention, the attainment of 
such a ministry is not easy. Among other things, 
our authoritative Rural Church Programme in- 
sists that the pastor must make his church the 
center of the social life of the community, plan 
social functions for the young people, organize 
boys' clubs, "keep something doing in your church 
all the time," establish rural study classes for 
training leaders for conventional church work 
and for leaders of community service, develop all 
phases of evangelistic effort, take an active in- 
terest in Farmers 5 Institutes and other rural 
organizations, attend public sales, introduce a 
circulating library where none exists, arrange a 
course of lectures on "Good Housekeeping," 
"Farming," or give stereopticon lectures, or- 
ganize a Religious Day School during the summer 
vacation, organize and direct a staff of parish 
visitors, also a band of personal workers and a 
few silent workers, and "use all righteous means 
to lift your community and your entire parish 



68 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

up to the highest state of moral, industrial, social, 
and spiritual efficiency." And then, after enumer- 
ating a few collective tasks for all the ministers 
on a district, such as the organization of county 
farm bureaus, county welfare bureaus, com- 
munity clubs, county library systems, community 
health campaigns, home economic campaigns, and 
the care of the unfortunate classes in county 
homes, lockups, jails, and insane asylums, the 
program concludes with the earnest exhortation, 
"Above all, determine to make your sermons on 
the Sabbath scriptural, spiritual, and inspira- 
tional." That is a stupendous task for any one 
man. It isn't a program: it is a plan of cam- 
paign. And there is a real peril that he who 
undertakes to carry it out will find himself drained 
of physical and spiritual vitality alike. A recent 
article by Dfr. Mitchell, of Metropolitan Church, 
Washington, protesting against the ceaseless 
demands upon a minister's time and strength, and 
voicing the cry, "Give the preacher a chance," 
has in it real food for reflection. And there was 
something tragic in another article, in which a 
Metropolitan pastor declared that he would find 
time to commune with God and get from him a 
real and vital message, or he would leave the work. 
I say that, in this age of complex living, a 
deep and effective ministry such as is really needed 
is not easy; but I affirm that it is possible. The 



IF I WERE A YOUNG MINISTER 69 

young man can attain it if he will. He must feel 
its worth ; formulate a plan and work it ; recog- 
nize his limitations and honor the laws of spiritual 
life and growth; learn to discriminate in values 
and, consequently, to "know the duty of refusing 
to do good"; hold steady against outward oppo- 
sition and inward inertia; be content sometimes 
with slow progress and meager results; guard 
himself always against the lure of popularity and 
the substitution of the lesser good; amid disap- 
pointment and disaster and misunderstanding, he 
must "endure as seeing the invisible" ; it may be, 
indeed, that, like his Master, he will have to walk 
the lonely path of the broken heart; but in the 
end he will achieve, and, in the largest and truest 
sense, he will know the meaning of that mysterious 
promise, "The works that I do shall ye do also, 
and greater works than these shall ye do because 
I go to my Father." 

I envy the young minister of the gospel to-day 
more than I do anybody else on earth. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE SIN OF SELF-DECEPTION 



Before the overwhelming immensities of the universe, re- 
ligion alone remains unabashed. Things are as they are. 
New names do not alter them. Evil is evil. Pain is pain. 
Death is death. And it is only by accepting them as they 
are that religion can be true to herself. Let them be what 
they are and religion will deal with them. Let the sinner be 
a sinner and she will put her arms around him. Let the sheep 
be veritably lost and she will recover them. Let the gloom 
thicken and her radiance shall glow like the noonday. Let 
life be tragic and she will lift it up among the stars. — Author 
unknown. 

Life finds most dangerous enemies in the peril of the lower 
attainment, and in the lack of honesty and fellowship with 
the best; and so in refusing to face the outstanding facts of 
life with an honest reaction upon them, and in turning away 
from the supreme sources of life. ... If you would get that 
real sharing in the life of God in which anything that can be 
called religion must consist, do not begin to juggle with your 
reason and conscience. Do not twist the evidence. . . . One 
cannot build solidly on sham anywhere. — Henry Churchill 
King. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE SIN OF SELF-DECEPTION 

We were all talking about life in the large, with 
no special reference to things moral or spiritual. 
Suddenly the Young Lady College Graduate 
spoke up and said: "When I really want to do a 
thing, I first convince myself that it is right." 

She said it neither boastfully nor apologeti- 
cally, but as casually as one would make an obser- 
vation on the weather. Furthermore, she con- 
siders herself a consistent Christian, and would 
resent the suggestion that her ethics are not as 
sound as those of the Sermon on the Mount. As 
a matter of fact, however, her casual remark was 
a tacit confession that, where impulse or desire 
was involved, she had established the practice 
of settling all questions of casuistry by deliberate 
self-deception. And even as she spoke I thought 
of Ibsen, with his doctrine of illusions, and of 
that striking Scripture phrase, "the deceitfulness 
of sin." 

Self-deception is the basis of all sin. Some- 
times it is conscious and deliberate; sometimes it 
is unconscious. Not once in ten thousand times 
73 



74? THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

does a man (or a woman) face a thing and say: 
"That is wrong, absolutely and undeniably 
wrong. Nevertheless, I am going to do it." 

Far from it. He begins by giving it a coat of 
moral whitewash. In some instances he admits 
the wrongness of the thing in general, but justifies 
himself in this particular case by specious argu- 
ment or concocted excuse. In others he distorts 
facts and emasculates moral laws until he abso- 
lutely hoodwinks himself into believing that he 
is doing right. Always he ends with a temporarily 
complacent feeling of freedom from all blame- 
worthiness. 

That is the gist of Stephen Crane's remarkable 
story, The Red Badge of Courage. A young man 
goes to war. He thinks himself the bravest man 
in the army. In the thick of the battle, however, 
he discovers himself in the grip of a strange 
sensation. It is strangely like fear and absolute 
cowardice, but he reasons that he isn't afraid 
and couldn't be a coward. Then he convinces 
himself that the whole army really ought to 
retreat. In view of the fact that they do nothing 
of the kind, he decides that he ought to whether 
the rest do or not. So he runs, precipitately, 
rapidly, ingloriously. Safely away, he once more 
accuses himself of cowardice. But that cannot 
be, so he reasons, argues, debates with himself 
until he ends with the triumphant and comfort- 



THE SIN OF SELF-DECEPTION 75 

able conviction that he is the only really wise and 
courageous man in the army, while all the rest 
are stupid fools. If all our biographies were 
fully written, would that youth's experience seem 
unique and pathological? Is there not a some- 
thing in each of us that rises up and cries, "I 
know that man"? 

That is the way the devil tried to debauch the 
Christ. The father of lies did not openly ask 
him to do wrong; he began by trying to convince 
the young man Jesus that the exercise of miracle- 
performing power for selfish ends was only com- 
mendable self-preservation and that spectacular 
foolhardiness was faith in the Father's care, and 
he used the Word very deftly to verify his claims. 
Undoubtedly too that is the way the devil led 
William II to his state of moral topsy-turviness. 
The Kaiser told himself that he did not want the 
world war, and that he was leading his people 
against barbaric hosts who precipitated the con- 
flict for the sole purpose of annihilating the Ger- 
man nation, until he, in all probability, really 
believed it. 

It is just as true that self-deception is a device 
by which Satan keeps men living in sin as it is 
that he uses that means to start them along the 
"way that seemeth right." The difficulty of find- 
ing a convict who will admit that he is to blame 
for his incarceration is well known to the penolo- 



76 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

gist or sociologist. He will not admit it to any- 
body else because he will not admit it to himself. 
By the same token, the difficulty of getting men 
living in sin to feel and confess their sinfulness 
has become one of the outstanding facts in the 
religious life of our time. In the world of prac- 
tical affairs there is a deal of vague sentimentaliz- 
ing about "the spiritual life" which fraternizes 
very comfortably with questionable habits and 
practices, and among the intellectuals there is 
a positive attack upon the spiritual necessity of 
a conviction of sin. In an article published a year 
or two ago an ex-preacher who has left the church 
because it is a failure, to become an apostle of a 
Beyond Christianity (whatever that may mean), 
says with a sneer: "We must feel that we are 
sinners, and go groveling in the dust before God 
before we can be saved." 

You may call it a "trying to climb up some 
other way." I call it, in both of its aspects, a 
species of self-deception, for that is at the bottom 
of it all. The corrupt politician does not admit 
his corruptions, even to himself. He excuses 
himself with the trite (and false) affirmation that 
"the purification of politics is an iridescent 
dream." The war profiteer pockets his swollen 
profits with the comforting thought that "every- 
body else would get them if they could." The 
German general staff explain away the most re- 



THE SIN OF SELF-DECEPTION 77 

volting atrocities with the plea of "military neces- 
sity" ; the thieving employee justifies his petty 
thefts with the claim that he is taking only what 
really belongs to him; and the modern immoral 
salves his accusing conscience with the modern 
teaching (which is as old as the devil) that the 
impulses were given us for indulgence, not re- 
straint. 

That is the way too that Satan tries to steal 
the soul of every follower of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. As Phillips Brooks so tartly put it, 
"Satan takes us by side attacks." The most 
awful temptation that ever assailed me came 
clothed in the garb of a Scripture injunction. 
All moral compromise begins in self-deception, in 
convincing ourselves that the wrong is right, the 
forbidden is excusable. All spiritual deteriora- 
tion has its roots in self-deception, in deliberately 
shutting our eyes to the compulsion of a divine 
command or the sinfulness of a questionable prac- 
tice. 

The war did much to bring many to their 
senses. In the presence of death and the unseen 
world a multitude of heedless and world-intoxi- 
cated men were stripped of all illusions. Under 
the burden of sorrow and care frivolous women 
found themselves and God. But what is the way 
out for the ordinary man? In what lies escape 
from the peril for him? Where is he to find the 



78 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

secret of insight into reality, of accuracy in 
spiritual and moral valuations? 

In spiritual honesty. Sincerity and self-decep- 
tion cannot dwell in the same soul. Life, as a 
whole, can be right only for the man who faces 
every situation and circumstance, every inclina- 
tion and desire with unbiased and illumined judg- 
ment, not surreptitiously trying to "convince 
himself that it is right," but honestly asking, 
"Is it right? Is it wise?" and then courageously 
squaring his conduct with his knowledge. Plain 
honesty would save many a man from moral 
calamity and lead to the deliverance of many 
from bondage to sin. 

In a strong passage, which views the matter 
in its social as well as its personal aspects, 
Rauschenbusch states this necessity most force- 
fully. He says: "The A B C of social renewal 
and moral advance is for each of us to face our 
sins sincerely and get on a basis of frankness 
with God and ourselves. Therefore Christianity 
set out with a call for personal repentance. If 
we only acted up to what we know to be right, 
this world would be a different place. But we 
fool ourselves with protective coloring devices in 
order to keep our own self-respect. Take our 
language, for instance; it reeks with evasive 
euphemisms intended to make nasty sins look 
prettier. We call stealing swiping and cheat- 



THE SIN OF SELF-DECEPTION 79 

ing cribbing. As soon as we face the facts, we 
realize that what we call peccadilloes in ourselves 
are the black sins that have slain the innocents 
and have ridden humanity through all its his- 
tory. That is the beginning of social vision. 
Personal repentance is a social advance." Those 
words, addressed to college students, have great 
value for every man who would be true to himself 
and to God. 

Spiritual safety lies in spiritual wariness. 
"The heart is deceitful above all things." The 
final fruit of self-deception is hypocrisy on the 
one hand and hardness on the other, in having 
eyes that see not and ears that hear not. That 
phrase "the deceitfulness of sin" is charged with 
portentous significance. And that this deceitful- 
ness would imperil believers themselves is shown 
by the repeated biblical injunction, "Let no man 
deceive you," and by the warning that those 
prophets of evil would appear who "would, if 
possible, deceive the very elect." This never- 
ceasing danger led Saint Paul to exhort his "chil- 
dren in the Lord" to "walk circumspectly," that 
is, with their eyes wide open, and caused the 
unknown who gave us the Epistle to the Hebrews 
to fill his pages with solemn warnings to the chil- 
dren of God. 

More than in all else, however, soul safety and 
the assurance of spiritual growth are found in 



80 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

prayer. The solution of every spiritual problem 
is found in prayer. The right answer to every 
question of casuistry is secured through prayer. 
To the man who honestly and persistently asks 
God's guidance, that guidance will be given. He 
will not be preserved from blunders, but he will 
be kept from sin. Bad habits and harmful prac- 
tices, even those seemingly harmless things which 
dwell in the twilight zone of ethics, cannot stand 
the acid test of God's presence. It is in that 
presence that the hitherto "undiscovered areas 
of sin" are disclosed to the earnest seeker for 
light, and it is there that the battles are fought 
and won which mean the ultimate conquest of 
those areas. Prayer — persistent and real — is the 
surest guarantee of complete spiritual self- 
revelation. The surest way to "know thyself" 
is to know God by personal communion. The 
antidote for self-deception and all the illusions 
that mislead humanity is that constant fellowship 
with the Father which has its roots in the will 
to know and do his will under every circumstance 
and at whatever cost. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PREACHER AND THE DEMAND FOR 
A SIMPLE GOSPEL 



Definers and defenders of the faith are always needed, 
but it is bad for a church when its ministers count it their true 
work to define and defend the faith rather than to preach the 
gospel. Beware of the tendency to preach about Christian- 
ity, and try to preach Christ. To discuss the relations of 
Christianity and science, Christianity and society, Christian- 
ity and politics is good. To set Christ forth to men so that 
they shall know him, and in gratitude and love become his — 
that is far better. — Phillips Brooks. 

Whatever else this war has done to thoughtful men in the 
army, it has made them see that life is short, that only a few 
great things in religion matter, and that it is a waste of breath 
to spend much time on accidentals. — Harry Emerson Fosdick. 

Sin has no place in the vocabulary of science. Therefore 
men of culture are not bothering about their sins, still less 
about their punishment. — Sir Oliver Lodge. 

The faith which magnifies the unmerited and sin-destroying 
grace of God is the only satisfying religion, because it is the 
only adequate interpretation of all the facts. — G. H. Johnston- 
Ross. 

The question of how much knowledge or intellectual under- 
standing of divine things is indispensable to an effective faith 
is one that we cannot answer. Experience shows that a very 
slight knowledge may often be sufficient intellectual founda- 
tion for a strong and efficient faith. Strength of faith is gov- 
erned more by willingness of heart than by intellectual dis- 
cernment. — Author unknown. 

To follow Jesus, even though one does not fully understand 
him; to do the will even if one has not learned the doctrine; 
to perceive through much darkness that the Life is the Light 
of men; these are the marks of the new obedience. — Peabody. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PREACHER AND THE DEMAND FOR 
A SIMPLE GOSPEL 

The movement toward simplicity in the Chris- 
tian doctrine and message has been gathering 
momentum for a great many years. The trouble 
with it has been that some of its most diligent 
promoters have been actuated by mixed motives 
and have had in mind an objective of dubious 
value. The elements of practicality and urgency 
have now been injected into the situation by a 
definite and repeated request by the men in the 
camps and trenches for "a simple gospel." Here 
we have neither a set of modern feudal barons, 
crying for an innocuous pulpit that they may 
continue their plundering without interruption, 
nor a group of narrow dogmatists whose sole 
desire is to have the truth run through their own 
little mold, nor a modern cult of unrestricted 
progressives set upon the annihilation of all 
dogma, but a multitude of hungry men who want 
to be fed. And in one case, at least, as one eccle- 
siastical leader has pointed out, they furnish as 
an evidence of good faith an avowal of belief in 
God, Christ, and man's need of salvation. 
83 



84 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

The relation of this sincere request to the 
Church as a whole is a question of sufficient com- 
plexity to tax the power of the wisest. Strange 
to say, the restatement of Christian theology in 
its simplest terms and the formation of a common 
creed which will permit Christian unity without 
spiritual sterility is no easy task. But the bear- 
ing of the request on the man in the pulpit is a 
different matter. To him, both the definite de- 
mand and "the great expectancy," formless and 
inarticulate, which backgrounds it, become an im- 
perative summons to the preaching of essentials, 
to such an interpretation of God and Christ and 
life as shall not only convince men's minds, but 
produce in them conviction, decision, and action. 
Probably never before in human history has there 
been such an almost universal weariness of sterile 
differences and meaningless speculation, a "divine 
unrest," terminating not so much in the abstract 
question, "What is truth?" as in the vital, per- 
sonal question, "What must I do to do the work 
of God?" The multitude think they don't want 
dogma, but in the best sense of that much-abused 
term, that is just what they do want. They want 
a "Thus saith the Lord." As Dr. William V. 
Kelley said three years ago, "What this dubitat- 
ing age needs and what the pulpit must give is 
certainties- 99 And the pressing need and positive 
demand is for the certainties that relate to the 



DEMAND FOR A SIMPLE GOSPEL 85 

adjustment of one's life to God. In the right- 
eously impatient words of one aroused man, "Was 
there ever a time when the race had such a crimson 
commentary upon Calvary? Why not seize it 
boldly and use the glorious exegesis without 
apology, instead of dabbling in vague hypotheses 
about the moral influence of vicarious suffering?" 
That means that a great deal that has passed 
for preaching in the past twenty-five years will 
have to go. It must go because it consists of 
the bootless discussion of irrelevant questions, 
themes which have no bearing upon life. It was 
at the close of a sermon of that character de- 
livered at Northfield by one of the erudite scholars 
of Great Britain that Dwight L. Moody ex- 
claimed, "What's the use of talking to these 
students about the two Isaiahs when the great 
majority of them don't know there's one yet?" 
And a young college editor bore melancholy 
testimony to the net results of such preaching 
when he wrote: "We know all about religion 
except how it feels. We can tell all about the 
seven big religions of the world and haven't any. 
We are critical, but we have no simple faith to 
help our life. We pick out good and bad points 
in all religions, pigeonhole results, and cease to 
worry." It is now quite thoroughly understood 
that we have a new Bible (which everybody has 
and very few read), and a New Theology (some 



86 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

of which is as ancient as the earliest heresies in 
Christian history), and a new psychology and a 
new gospel of social service, that Archbishop 
Ussher and his chronology are both passe, and 
that Adam fell up and not down, if, indeed, he 
ever lived at all; that the child is born into the 
kingdom and God is immanent and man is divine 
(though he often acts like the devil), and that the 
gospel has social implications. The time has now 
come to tell men just as plainly as possible what 
they must do to be saved, whether that salvation 
is viewed as rescue or the recovery of the total 
man to society and God. "What is the use of 
sermons that mean nothing and do nothing?" 
Or what is the use of pecking away at the leaves 
and branches when the ax needs to be laid at 
the root of the tree; of flogging men for not 
applying their religion to their economic life, 
when a great many of them have none to apply? 
One sermon that leads men to say, as did the 
thoroughly aroused Scot, "I am determined to 
go out and do the devil some definite damage," 
is worth a hundred that establish the fact of the 
four strands in Genesis or dilate on the glories 
of the ideal Kingdom, without arousing a single 
conscience. Better the story of a little ewe lamb, 
followed by such a cry of "Thou art the man" 
as to bring a David to his knees in shame-faced 
contrition for his dastardly sin, than an elaborate 



DEMAND FOR A SIMPLE GOSPEL 87 

treatise on doctrine or life which leaves the trans- 
gressor undisturbed in his smug complacency and 
the common man saying, "It may be true, but 
what difference does it make?" 

This concentration upon the essentials and the 
honest effort to interpret them in terms of ex- 
perience does not mean that the constructive con- 
clusions of reverent scholarship will be set aside, 
or that the social aspects of the gospel will be 
ignored, or that preaching will deteriorate to the 
monotonous reiteration of a few set phrases and 
worn-out themes. It means that all the riches 
of knowledge and powers of man will be focused 
upon the supreme business of building men into 
the kingdom of God. The value of a sermon 
depends, not upon its subject, but upon its object. 
Its gospel quality depends not so much upon its 
circumference as upon its center. As a matter 
of fact, there is more genuine simplicity in the 
incisive analysis of Robertson, the Attic beauty 
of Phillips Brooks or the exquisite phrases of 
Silvester Home than in the extemporaneous rant- 
ing of one whose thought is muddy, while his 
vocabulary is limited. And there is more real 
gospel in John Wesley's "Reformation of Man- 
ners" than in many a man's labored interpreta- 
tion of the atonement. It makes little difference 
where a man starts or how far a-field he roams, 
provided he bring his hearers at last face to face 



88 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

with Jesus Christ and leave them on their knees 
before their revealed Lord and Redeemer. Any- 
thing that does that is preaching. And, though 
many do not realize it, that is an achievement 
difficult enough to tax the inspired genius of the 
biggest man God ever made. "To urge people 
to follow Christ may lead to the merest flabbiest 
pulpit rhetoric; the effective gospel is to preach 
a Christ who leaves men unable to do anything 
else." And the man who undertakes to do that, 
to attain that result which alone constitutes the 
justification of preaching, will find ample scope 
for the widest knowledge and the most consum- 
mate skill. 

Of course the men in the pulpit will not find 
themselves in agreement as to the content of this 
simple gospel. If the primary purpose of bring- 
ing men into the kingdom of God be dominant, 
it is not necessary that they should. The Holy 
Spirit condescends to reach the hearts of men by 
means of widely differing theologies and opinions. 
John Wesley and George Whitefield fought each 
other over the vexing questions of foreordination 
and free grace, but together they fought the 
devil with the offer to sinful men of salvation by 
faith in Jesus Christ, with the net result of two 
continents transformed. But the point to be 
noted is that their circles of passionately pro- 
claimed truth intersected at two points, the 



DEMAND FOR A SIMPLE GOSPEL 89 

Saviourhood of Christ and the sinfulness of man. 
And those two truths must inhere in the message 
of to-day, or it were better that we had never been 
born. As the learned judge said to the young 
Whipple, afterward Bishop Whipple, "Don't 
preach to the judge; preach to the sinful man." 
Any gospel that fails to probe humanity's moral 
sore clear to the core is not a simple and effectual, 
but an emasculated and ineffectual gospel. The 
chief obstacle in the path of an overwhelming 
spiritual awakening is the universal evasion of 
personal responsibility for sin. O, there is plenty 
of the "sense of sin," but it is the other fellow's 
sin. Modern methods of wrongdoing by proxy, 
of absentee deviltry of all kinds, have almost de- 
stroyed that consciousness of blameworthiness 
without which, in spite of the scoff of the intel- 
lectual and the dribble of the sentimentalist, 
moral reconstruction and spiritual regeneration 
are improbable, if not impossible. 

But if the church accuse the world of spiritual 
callousness the world accuses the church of moral 
timidity or worse, and to an unbiased observer 
it looks like another case of the pot and the 
kettle. Granted everything that can be said in 
praise of modern Protestantism, the fact remains 
that some men have not sought the church's 
proffered salvation because they did not consider 
it worth the having. Judged by its interpreta- 



90 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

tion in many pulpits, orthodox as well as hetero- 
dox, it cost nothing except languid acquiescence 
to a few devitalized formulae, and judged by the 
membership roll it resulted all too often in com- 
placent hypocrisy or imperfectly sterilized 
worldliness. To the supersensitive there seemed 
to be a rather too free translation of the half 
truth contained in Lowell's lines: 

•* 'Tis only heaven that is given away, 
'Tis only God may be had for the asking." 

In plain terms the unpardonable sin of which 
the church stands accused by the world to-day 
is ethical insincerity. In spite of Beecher's tart 
statement that "You can't pray cream and live 
skimmed milk," there are many trying to achieve 
that moral impossible. And the gravity of the 
situation is intensified by the fact that in many 
instances the heads of the churches know it and 
do nothing about it. Grant that church member- 
ship does not connote perfection (though it does 
connote sincerity), and that the administration 
of church discipline is a difficult and delicate busi- 
ness at the best, the fact remains that a revival 
of religion whose initial characteristic consisted 
of a courageous and thorough ecclesiastical house- 
cleaning would stand a fair chance of having as 
its crowning glory a countless multitude of 
genuine conversions. It is immensely significant 



DEMAND FOR A SIMPLE GOSPEL 91 

that John Wesley conducted no campaigns for 
church membership and with a fine disregard for 
both the parable of the wheat and the tares and 
annual statistics, made no ado about dropping 
hundreds of delinquents at a time. In short, there 
is great need of our being reminded, in our eager- 
ness to meet the demands of the times, that "noth- 
ing can be taken away by a broader theology 
from the relentlessness of the moral process of 
salvation. One may change one's conception of 
the Supreme Being from Moloch to our Father 
in heaven, from the destroyer to the Saviour of 
mankind, but until one shall agonize in the conflict 
with passion and through heroic suffering put 
on the form of righteousness, there can be no 
improvement." If it is true that the simple 
gospel so desired to-day in order to be an effec- 
tual gospel must have its roots in the blood- 
stained soil of Calvary, it is also true that it 
must have as its first and finest fruit a morally 
reconstructed and spiritually regenerated per- 
sonality. 



CHAPTER VIII 
NOVEMBER AND JUNE IN RELIGION 



The Crucifix stood there, an emblem of sad and noble 
truths — that pleasure is not an end but an accident, and that 
pain is the choice of the magnanimous. — Robert Louis Steven- 
son. 

The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just 
as false as the idea, shared by the great majority, the idea to 
which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a 
place of entertainment. Life is a place of service, and in the 
service one has to suffer at times a good deal that is hard to 
bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But 
that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a 
service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves 
and their personal happiness. — Tolstoi to his son, llya. 



CHAPTER VIII 
NOVEMBER AND JUNE IN RELIGION 

J. Bbierley likened the Puritan type of piety 
to a November fog and affirmed, in striking 
phrase, that its chief function was the exhalation 
of gloom. It was an apt characterization, so 
apt that one could fairly feel the chill of the 
sunless spiritual autumn. 

If the inimitable essayist had described early 
twentieth-century spirituality in meteorological 
metaphor, I wonder if he would not have called 
it the religion of June sunshine and declared that 
its chief function was the radiation of cheerful- 
ness. Instead of the thunders of Calvinism there 
was the genial warmth of a liberal theology, with 
special emphasis on the kindliness of God and 
the divinity of man. Instead of the dismal doc- 
trine that this life is a probation and that self- 
realization is attained by the suppression of all 
natural instincts, there was the enthusiastic belief 
that this world was given man to enjoy and that 
normal expression leads to self-realization. In- 
stead of hair-raising hymns and somber volumes 
like Holy Living and Holy Dying and Foxe's 
95 



96 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

Book of Martyrs, there were the sunshine and 
glory songs, and what some carping critic has 
called "the O Let Us Be Joyful" books. Out 
on the periphery were the new-born but lusty 
sects with the slogans, "Follow us and you will 
be happy; follow us and you will be healthy; 
follow us and you will be prosperous." Of course 
there were exceptions and variations, but the pre- 
vailing type of spirituality (we no longer use the 
word "piety") in the early years of the twentieth 
century was strikingly like the exhilarating at- 
mosphere of an early summer day. 

There is much to be said in favor of the change. 
If proof texts were not out of style, I would say 
that the Scriptures themselves are responsible 
for the statement that a merry heart doeth good 
like a medicine. "Some days must be dark and 
dreary," but an unrelieved stretch of gloomy 
weather is both dismal and depressing. Sunshine 
is as necessary to the health of the spirit as it 
is to the health of the body. The trouble with 
the Puritan was that he was so intent upon look- 
ing at the graveyard that he couldn't see the 
sky. And yet, in spite of assurances that we were 
making marvelous progress, there seemed to be 
something lacking. The easy-going benevolence 
and irrepressible good spirits of a generation that 
loved amusements and resented restrictions of any 
kind did not seem to produce any better men or 



NOVEMBER AND JUNE 97 

bring in the kingdom of God any faster than did 
the vertebrate narrowness of Cromwell and his 
Roundheads or the stubborn loyalty to conscience 
which drove the Mayflower and her psalm-singing 
passengers through the perils of an uncharted 
sea to the forbidding fastnesses of an untamed 
wilderness. In spite of the determination to be 
happy there was unrest, a growing conviction 
that while God was in his heaven, all was not right 
with the world. And then came the war. 

The relation of the war to religion is even yet 
a matter of controversy and conjecture. Of 
some things, however, we are sure. The world- 
conflict was at once a revealer of the need of 
change and the cause of change. It not only 
exposed the rottenness of our civilization, but 
also knocked a great deal of our theology and 
philosophy into a cocked hat. You talk about 
the war abolishing theology. It was God 
Almighty's demand for a theology thorough 
enough to account for the lurking devilishness 
as well as the spiritual possibilities in human 
nature. Man may be divine, but he certainly 
is capable of moral lapses which suggest that 
there was more than a germ of truth in the cast- 
off doctrine of total depravity. The serious busi- 
ness of reconstructing a shattered world is dis- 
closing to thoughtful men the puerility of the 
pursuit of happiness. Happiness is not an end. 



98 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

In fact, the New Testament says nothing at all 
aJbout its being a part of the Christian life. To 
all those who came after him the Master offered 
peace in the midst of life's turmoil, blessedness, 
often with persecution, and that heaven-born joy 
which earth's vicissitudes could not disturb or 
destroy. Orison Swett Marden's book on "How 
to Get What You Want" has perished in the 
rarified atmosphere of a new world spirit — an- 
other proof of "the expulsive power of a new 
affection." We are not here to get what we want, 
but to do the will of God and welcome the conse- 
quences. The New Testament promise to the 
faithful is not prosperity, but Life. Of course 
godliness is profitable, but he who tries to become 
godly for profit will end in the devil's almshouse, 
and he who draws the biggest dividends will find 
they are not paid in the coin of the realm. This 
life is both privilege and a probation. This world 
was given us to enjoy, but woe to him who loves 
the world and so crowds out the love of God. 
Self-realization is attained by expression, but it 
is not attained by self-indulgence. Our appetites 
were given us to master, not to gratify. Re- 
nunciation, self-denial, suffering for the sake of 
others — that is the thorny and glorious path by 
which we attain the heights. In other words, we 
possess by sharing; we get all that is worth while 
in life only as we forget everything in the pas- 



NOVEMBER AND JUNE 99 

sionate love of God and man; we live only as we 
die. Of all these truths, which are as old as God, 
this crucial time is reminding men. Not all will 
learn the lesson, for there are always those who 
have eyes and see not, ears have they and hear 
not. But the elect will see and understand. 

But the war did more than reconstruct men's 
thinking. It saved men's souls. It "stabbed men 
awake." Poor Elijah wept because he alone of 
the faithful was left. And all the time there were 
seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to 
Baal. So the holy remnant in the early years 
of the twentieth century bewailed the lack of the 
noble and spiritual in the younger generation, 
and the heroic and godly were not dead at all: 
they were only half suffocated. We did the best 
we could to spoil our young people, to make them 
irresponsible and lawless and luxury-lovers and 
weaklings, but all the time God was at work in- 
side, fostering that "homesickness for heaven" 
that makes the far country a miserable makeshift 
and earth itself but a wayside inn. All that was 
needed was something big enough and compelling 
enough to grip, and it came. Not all reacted 
favorably to the stimulus, but multitudes did. 
Donald Hankey was not the only one to find 
peace and the highest self "over there." On the 
mutilated bosom of France, Belgium, Italy, and 
the East, many a youth found not only a deeper 



100 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

philosophy of life but life itself, and found it in 
the old, old way of faith in a Personal Redeemer 
and vicarious suffering for humanity. Some were 
granted the priceless privilege of martyrdom. 
Some may lose the vision with the return of peace 
and its enticements. But others — God's own — 
were not only disillusioned but illumined, not 
simply chastened but sanctified, equipped to lead 
humanity into the truth that maketh free, the 
knowledge and possession of a Christianity that 
is buoyant without being superficial and serious 
without being somber, the Christianity of con- 
scious oneness with Christ. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NEED OF A NEW CONCEPTION OF 
GOD 



A cheap theology ends in a cheap life. — Henry Drummond. 

It is a matter of history that the broadening of creeds has 
usually been accompanied by a great decay of zeal on the 
part of believers. — George A. Gordon. 

We feel ourselves to be separated from God, and conse- 
quently crippled in our faith by things which troubled the 
ancients very little. Therefore the only God who can reveal 
himself to us is one who shows himself to us in our moral 
struggle as the Power to which our souls are really subject. 
This is what is vouchsafed to us in the revelation of God in 
Jesus Christ. 

If there be any rationality in the universe at all, then the 
life into which we go must be the logical and inevitable out- 
come of the life lived here. In this sense, at least, some 
judgment must always be passed upon the life, and account- 
ability must always stand. — Henry Churchill King. 

Where consideration has so often been freshened by new 
providences and new revelations of God, and all best capaci- 
ties of truth and feeling have been mocked and hardened by 
the abuses of a life, what magic is there to be in the strange 
environment and discoveries of another state of being, that 
they are going to make men susceptible without susceptibili- 
ties left, and turn them back to the right which they have 
lost the sense of, and from which they have all their life long 
turned uncaringly away? — Horace Bushnell. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NEED OF A NEW CONCEPTION OF 
GOD 

It is now quite generally agreed that Ger- 
many's madness can be traced straight back to 
Germany's apostasy. Putting the facts in terms 
of national life, it is said that German Kultur> 
with its brood of insane and piratical acts, is 
the legitimate offspring of German rationalism. 
Or, personalizing the whole matter, it is stated 
that ex-Emperor William's philosophy and con- 
duct are alike fiendish because his god, with whom 
he seemed for so long to be on astonishingly fa- 
miliar terms, is not the Christian God at all, but 
some barbaric deity. Here is another case of a 
man's becoming like the being whom he worships. 

It has not yet been said that the same relation 
of cause and effect holds good in the case of the 
modern world's conception of God and its moral 
and spiritual state; and yet the available facts 
are just as convincing. Look at the situation. 
The three things most frequently postulated con- 
cerning God are, first, that he is love; second, 
that he is our Father; third, that he is immanent 
in the universe of which he is the Creator. And 
103 



104 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

of the three, the most frequently affirmed and 
the universally accepted is that he is Love. Even 
when men think of him as Father, it is as the 
loving Father. And even when they talk of his 
immanence, they dwell upon the fact that he is 
immanent in love. The stupendous fact that God 
is Love has captured the imagination of Christen- 
dom. 

Now, rightly interpreted and viewed in its rela- 
tion to the whole body of revealed truth, that 
one of the eternal verities is of superlative value 
to mankind. "When John wrote his copulative 
sentence in his first epistle, he inaugurated a new 
era in Christian understanding." But right 
there lies the crux of the existing situation. This 
truth is not rightly interpreted, and it is viewed 
entirely apart from its relation to the whole body 
of truth. In that statement I am not referring 
to the fact that much of our modern theology is 
not orthodox, but to the obvious fact that the 
popular or prevailing idea of God is as far from 
the truth as is the ex-emperor's. "We hold in our 
mind conceptions of God that are not much better 
than the Kaiser's." In his discussion of "The 
Unity of God's Character," William Newton 
Clarke says: "We ascribe to God certain quali- 
ties of character, set forth in familiar terms, but 
when we come to define them we are under the 
influence of our own limitations, and however 



A NEW CONCEPTION OF GOD 105 

large and worthy the terms that we use, our con- 
ceptions are sure to become narrowed toward the 
dimensions of humanity. Naturally, if not in- 
evitably, we bring the perfection of God down 
toward our own imperfections." 

That is exactly what has happened in the pres- 
ent instance. The common man has reduced the 
statement "God is Love" to the perilous propor- 
tions of the half-truth. The equally momentous 
fact that He is holy, that "our God is a consum- 
ing fire," has been almost absolutely obliterated 
from his consciousness. Whether right or wrong 
from the standpoint of a strictly orthodox 
theology, men look upon God as their Father. 
They have forgotten that he is likewise their 
Creator; their Sovereign, to whom they owe 
allegiance; and their Judge, before whom they 
must stand at last and give an account of "the 
deeds done in the flesh." 

Furthermore, the modern idea of God errs 
not only in its isolation of the central truth of 
the gospel, but in its distortion of that truth. 
The perfection of God has been brought down 
to our imperfections. Or, in the blatant words 
of the skeptic Ingersoll, "Man has created God 
in his own image." The love of God has been 
evacuated of all ethical significance and all conse- 
quent spiritual compulsion. It has been trans- 
lated into terms of mawkish sentimentalism. In 



106 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

these days of a minimized parental authority, the 
average man believes in a Fatherhood of God 
devoid of all moral and spiritual exactions. He 
has not thought the matter out calmly and thor- 
oughly, for he does not do things that way. But 
"there is a logic of the hopes and fears that 
insidiously smuggles its conclusions into the realm 
of the intellect." By this devious and perilous 
route he has come to two more or less clearly 
defined convictions. 

The first is that God is not very exacting with 
his weak and erring children. This kindly dis- 
posed and thoroughly indulgent Parent not only 
does not hold his imperfect children blameworthy 
for their shortcomings, but he willingly accepts 
generosity in place of righteousness, humani- 
tarian activities as a substitute for "unspotted- 
ness from the world," and spasms of virtuous 
emotion as something "just as good" as the sur- 
render of the will. 

The other conviction or vague feeling which 
men have about God to-day is that he is eternally 
accessible. It is not so much a belief that they 
will have in the next world a chance to measure 
up to the rigid requirements of a moral and 
morally exacting God as it is that this easy- 
going quality in the divine character is perma- 
nent; thus making the salvation of all men, how- 
ever far short they may have fallen of the 



A NEW CONCEPTION OF GOD 107 

Christian requirement, an assured fact. The 
average man, in his loo: 3 thinking, has not postu- 
lated a second probation. He has done away with 
the idea of probation entirely. In a strikingly 
calm, dispassionate article on "Religion in War 
Times," published in The Atlantic Monthly of 
September, 1918, Dr. William Ernest Hocking, 
professor of philosophy at Harvard University, 
says of the soldier who enlisted in the Allied 
cause: "Always there is something that sets this 
particular act of dedication [enlistment] apart 
in the mind of the decider. ... It tends to put 
him on fundamental good terms with the invisible 
universe as with visible society. And it is likely 
to serve as an unuttered argument to the effect 
that God, if there be a God, will not be too hard 
on him, whatever happens." 

It is unnecessary at this time to enlarge on the 
fact that a vast number of good people have 
translated that vague feeling into a certainty, 
and affirmed without hesitation that "going over 
the top" means salvation. It is quite essential, 
however, to call attention to the yet more sig- 
nificant fact that vast numbers who never saw 
the front-line trenches are obsessed with the idea 
that "God will not be too hard on them, whatever 
happens." In the three years just past, espe- 
cially, I have talked with all sorts and conditions 
of men, with men to many of whom it might truth- 



108 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

fully be said, "Many things thou lackest" ; and 
I found them all complacent and calm as regards 
their future. As one dissolute man said, "If my 
Father won't take care of me, who will?" Or, 
as another put it, in speaking of a mutual friend 
who had passed through a period of genuine con- 
viction of sin, "That's all bosh. The Almighty 
doesn't require that of anybody." 

The prevailing opinion as to the destiny of 
those who have died, whatever their moral and 
spiritual state at the time of their exit, is plainly 
stated by Elizabeth Ashe in her story Appraise- 
ment. The story begins with the announcement of 
Alan Reid's suicide, and the subsequent discovery 
by his young widow that he had been a defaulter 
of trust funds, and, at the time of his death, was 
living in illicit relations with his secretary. Indig- 
nant and ashamed, she went to call on his mother, 
but found her enumerating his good qualities as 
a child. Together they read his old letters, 
enlarged upon his cast-off virtues, and decided 
that, in spite of the fact that he went out of 
this world a thief, an adulterer, and a suicide, 
he would ultimately be all right. The author 
sums up her philosophy in a final statement which 
she puts into the mouth of the young widow: 
"Past and present are only a part of a life. 
There's the future, the long future to complete 
him. He will go on — with us, dear." 



A NEW CONCEPTION OF GOD 109 

In Dr. Hocking's analysis of the consciousness 
of the soldier, and Elizabeth Ashe's doctrine of 
the destiny of a scoundrel, we have the modern 
idea of God at perigee and apogee. Not only the 
man who enlisted, but also the sentimentalists of 
all shades, the intellectualists, and as many of the 
social idealists as believe in a future at all, have 
taken the yearning of "the larger hope," and the 
hypothesis of "the upward thrust by a Universal 
Spirit," and "the half truths and false psy- 
chology of popular altruism," and the erroneous 
conclusions of Christian Science, and evolved 
either an indulgent Parent who is too tender- 
hearted to punish anybody or an automatic salva- 
tion in which all men are included, willy-nilly. 

It is to be expected that such views of God 
and destiny would rob religion of its solemnity, 
life of its moral compulsion, and conscience of 
its authority. Fifty years ago, in his sermon 
entitled "One Chance Better than Many," Horace 
Bushnell pointed out the psychological stupidity 
and moral peril of such a flabby and unethical 
faith, if it can be called a faith. To assume for 
a moment that man can spend his whole life here 
consciously choosing the lower and inferior, 
letting the animal in him dominate the spiritual, 
substituting self-will for the will of God, and then, 
in the next world, by some magical power of 
divine love, either be made selfish and blessed at 



110 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

the same time or be transformed into an angel of 
light, is to do violence to all the teachings of 
psychology and to corrupt human life at its 
center. "It is a very self-evident fact that if 
we had two or more trials offered us, we should 
be utterly slack and neglectful in the first and 
should bring it to its end almost inevitably in a 
condition utterly unhopeful." It is just as true 
of ideas as it is of men, that "by their fruits ye 
shall know them." To put it subjectively, and 
to use a sorely overworked and much abused 
Scripture saying, "as he thinketh in his heart, 
so is he." Experience proved to John Wesley 
that a liberal theology does not always connote 
a low moral character in the individual, for he 
found that there were heterodox saints as well 
as orthodox sinners. But historical experience 
has proved beyond peradventure that a flabby 
and unethical conception of God, comprehending 
a "posthumous salvation" — what Bushnell iron- 
ically calls "a basement gospel" — reacts disas- 
trously upon the race as a whole. It is the merest 
commonplace that the element of reverence has 
gone from our modern religion. With the sense 
of God's holiness has gone the sense of man's 
sinfulness, and with the ethical conception of the 
Divine character has gone much of the reality 
from our religion. There is no use in contrasting 
the Present and the Past, in putting the worst 



A NEW CONCEPTION OF GOD 111 

of to-day beside the best of yesterday. But 
neither is anything to be gained by glossing over 
the facts. The triad of sins which curses the 
modern world is made up of hypocrisy, compro- 
mise, and presumption. There are many in the 
church who are substituting philanthropic ac- 
tivity for spiritual vitality, formal religion for 
a saving faith, forgetting God's insistent demand, 
"Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil 
of your doings from before mine eyes." Vain 
oblations have changed in outer aspect, but they 
are still offered by those who dream of a God 
who can be placated by gifts. The excuse that 
"a man must live" is offered in extenuation for 
corrupt business practices and participation in 
questionable enterprises. Instead of a social 
order based upon the clear consciousness that 
"you can't compromise on the big things of life," 
we have what Howells gently designates as "that 
easy-going, not evilly-intentioned potential im- 
morality, which regards common property as 
common prey." The universal assumption is 
that the exalted ethic of revealed truth must give 
way before the pressure of individual physical 
necessities and a hostile social order. The 
astounding thing about the world in general is 
not that moral laxity exists, but that in a multi- 
tude of cases it is justified by the specious plea 
of "moral freedom." And while the world war 



112 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

has modified some of these evils, it has left others 
untouched. 

There are not wanting those who say that all 
this is due to the lack of a "social consciousness." 
Unless I have read both my Bible and my history 
upside down, it is due, primarily at least, to the 
lack of a "God consciousness," of a deep and over- 
whelming realization that God's love is ethical, 
that God himself is inexorably exacting, and "life 
is ethical from the outset." There is a growing 
disdain for consequences, because there are no 
consequences serious enough to be concerned 
about. The occasional plea of the old-fashioned 
preacher to "flee from the wrath to come" is 
received with supercilious scorn or hilarious con- 
tempt. The simple and comfortable fact is that 
there is nothing to flee from. The average man 
has answered Joseph Cook's question, "Is there 
nothing in God to fear?" with just two words — 
"Absolutely nothing." And so he either contents 
himself with spiritual minimums, the calm confi- 
dence that "God, if there be a God, will not be 
too hard on him, whatever happens," or the 
satisfying hypothesis that the mysterious and 
unknown forces of another life will effect in his 
indifferent soul the needed transformation which 
the exigencies of this life could not. 

Obviously, then, any serious attempt to make 
the new social order Christian must be accom- 



A NEW CONCEPTION OF GOD 113 

panied by a rediscovery of the Christian God. 
And that means that we must turn from the 
philosophers and sentimentalists and intellectuals 
and social idealists, and endeavor to comprehend 
"the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," 
revealed to us not only in what Jesus said but 
also in what he was and did. It is not within 
the purpose of this essay to attempt anything 
like an outline of the Christian doctrine of God, 
but it is to insist that any doctrine or conception 
worthy of the name Christian must emphasize the 
ethical consistency and unity of the divine char- 
acter. One thing that the race needs "in order 
to full goodness" is a clear knowledge of the 
elements that go to make up Perfect Personality, 
"with a perception of what they mean and what 
they require." Two generations ago men needed 
to be told that "God is Love," that he is on their 
side. To-day they need to know that God's love 
is moral through and through, that he is not on 
their side unless they heed his voice and do his 
will. The modern world sadly needs a reemphasis 
of God's holiness and of the retributive element 
which inheres in that holiness. A legal enactment 
is not necessary in order that evildoers be pun- 
ished. The severity of the heavenly Father is 
as essential to his Fatherhood as is his goodness. 
Or, putting the truth in the terms of cause and 
effect, so popular in this scientific age, the conse- 



114 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

quences of sin are written into the moral universe 
and the nature of man, a moral being. Further- 
more, "a good God demands that his children be 
good," and that they be good here and now, or 
suffer the consequences. To do away with the 
crucial character of man's decision as to the 
fulfillment of his obligations to God, the proba- 
tionary character of life, and "the strict limita- 
tion of the probationary period to this life," is 
to deny the plain and explicit teachings of Jesus 
Christ. The man who insists upon the claim that 
"the redemptive purpose of God must continue 
forever" ought to be as honest as was Theodore 
Parker when he said, "I believe that Jesus Christ 
taught the everlasting punishment of the wicked, 
but I refuse to accept it on his authority." He 
ought to go farther and admit that his God is 
not the Christian God. Soft and easy concep- 
tions of God have no place in Holy Writ. In a 
terrific arraignment of the ex-Kaiser and a most 
melancholy prophecy of his probable destiny, 
Lyman Abbott says : "I believe that he will pass, 
as we all must pass, from the deceptive lights and 
theatric shows of this world to the revealing lights 
and stern judgments of the world to come. There 
he will stand for judgment before Him who de- 
nounced as a generation of vipers, fit only to be 
cast out as the offal of the universe to be de- 
stroyed by the fires of Gehenna, those who had 



A NEW CONCEPTION OF GOD 115 

devoured widows' houses and made long prayers. 
... I have no power to conceive what divine 
scorn and wrath he will confront who has spread 
over half a continent poverty, famine, disease, 
slavery, and death." 

Those are puissant words, and right well do 
they sound in an age of soft phrases and honeyed 
drippings. But is William Hohenzollern to face 
Almighty God in solitary shame and terror? 
Upon him alone are the scorn and wrath of an 
outraged Deity to be poured out? What of the 
whited sepulchers, by no means all "made in 
Germany," who are beautiful without but within 
are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness? 
And the profiteers who, even though they buy 
Liberty Bonds and sing "The Star Spangled 
Banner" with tearful eyes, justify Samuel John- 
son's blistering affirmation that "patriotism is the 
last refuge of a scoundrel"? And the impure, 
who would insult a holy God by attempting to 
offer him physical courage in place of a clean 
heart? And the apostles of compromise, between 
whose private life and business practices is a 
"great gulf fixed" ? And the horde of selfish and 
indifferent who, in the presence of the unending 
conflict between the forces of righteousness and 
forces of evil, turn a deaf ear to the cry, "Come 
up to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty"? Is it true that God will 



116 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

not be too hard on them or that the upward 
thrust of a Universal Goodness will bring them 
at last to blessedness and perfection, while, cower- 
ing under the fury of an indignant Creator, Wil- 
liam II suffers the punishment he so richly 
deserves ? 

The case may be summed up in a sentence, 
"When thy judgments are on the earth, then 
shall its inhabitants learn righteousness." The 
part of Dr. Abbott's philippic which needs to 
be burned into the consciousness of the race is 
"as we all must pass." When men know clearly 
and feel keenly that "God cannot be an enswath- 
ing kiss without also being a consuming fire"; 
that his love is ethical and inexorably exacting; 
that his insistent demand is "for a careful order- 
ing of the present life as antecedent to and deter- 
minant of future destiny"; then, and then only, 
shall we have a conception of the divine character 
consistent with the inspired word of his revela- 
tion, justified by psychology and historical ex- 
perience, and provocative of holy living and holy 
dying. A Christian social order or a widespread 
spiritual quickening of the race without a clear, 
Christian conception of God is a moral impossi- 
bility. 



CHAPTER X 

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL AND 
THE MODERN CHURCH 



It is an age, as is supposed, of great light, freedom of 
thought, and discovery of truth in matters of religion, the 
detection of the weakness and bigotry of our ancestors, and 
of the folly and absurdity of the nations of those that were 
accounted eminent divines in former generations; which no- 
tions, it is imagined, did destroy the very foundations of vir- 
tue and religion and enervate all precepts of morality, and in 
effect annul all difference between virtue and vice; and yet 
vice and wickedness did never so prevail like an overflowing 
deluge. It is an age wherein those mean and stingy princi- 
ples, as they are called, of our forefathers, which, as is sup- 
posed, deformed religion and led to unworthy thoughts of 
God, are very much discarded and grown out of credit, and 
supposed more free, noble, and generous thoughts of the 
nature of religion and of the Christian scheme are enter- 
tained; but yet never was an age wherein religion in general 
was so much despised and trampled on, and Jesus Christ and 
God Almighty so blasphemed and treated with open, daring 
contempt. — Jonathan Edwards, concerning his own age. 

We may dissent from many things urged by them, but 
they saw things on a grand scale. The Christianity they 
taught was one that could fill the horizon of an intellectual 
age and could inspire the awe-stricken devotion of souls like 
Milton and Zinzendorf and Doddridge and Toplady and the 
Wesleys. Of course they could, for it was a Christianity with 
the Rock of Ages as its foundation, with Calvary at its heart, 
and with an empty tomb as its seal of authority. — Charles 
Cuthbert Hall. 

Little has been done in our age toward the profounder vis- 
ion of the eternal in religion. It is humiliating that here we 
can do no more than prepare the way of the Lord; that we are 
fit for criticism, but not for insight, able to consider in scientific 
order what others have created, but unable to bring forth 
ourselves; that we are greater than the men of old in research, 
but immeasurably beneath them in the richness and reality 
of religion. The role of the prophet in the cleft of the rock, 
witnessing, so far as mortal man may, the pageant of the 
Eternal Goodness, is not for us; we are content to investigate 
the tradition of this high experience, to call attention to the 
cleft in the rock and the rubbish heap at either end. — George 
A. Gordon. 



CHAPTER X 

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL AND 
THE MODERN CHURCH 



Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick's criticism of the 
modern church, published in the January Atlantic, 
under the title "The Trenches and the Church 
at Home," is so sane and constructive that it 
seems like rank heresy to question the accuracy 
of any part of it. There is one paragraph, how- 
ever, which calls for more than passing attention, 
not only because it contains the mature judgment 
of the writer of the article, but because, as he 
says, it embodies in substance the greatest griev- 
ance which many good men have against organ- 
ized Christianity. These are the words of Dr. 
Fosdick : 

"The churches for generations have been urg- 
ing upon us an individualistic and self-centered 
gospel. We have been continuously supplied, in 
hymns, in liturgies, in sermons, with Jonathan 
Edwards's dominant ideal, 'I make seeking my 
salvation the main business in my life.' Even 
when this self-regarding motive has not been 

119 



120 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

centered in a post-mortem heaven, it has been 
centered, quite as selfishly, on this present life." 

Now, as I understand it, that is not a criticism 
of Jonathan Edwards's theology, which is "a 
faded tradition," or the emotional excesses 
which attended the great awakening and the Wes- 
leyan revival. It is an indictment of the ideal 
itself, of the gospel as preached by Edwards and 
Wesley and Whitefield and Finney and most of 
the other religious leaders of the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries. And, as I see it, the indict- 
ment really includes two counts, the claim that 
the gospel as so interpreted was, per se, "indi- 
vidualistic and self-centered," and the claim that 
the modern church has failed to retain its pri- 
macy in human affairs because of its stupid 
loyalty to that ideal. 

I wonder if that is really so. Is it really true 
that the whole genius of Christianity, as con- 
strued by those leaders of yesterday, was based 
upon and productive of "an excessive regard to 
one's personal interest," and that the modern 
church has become ethically sterile and socially 
ineffective because the attention of those who 
compose it has been centered either "on a post- 
mortem heaven or, quite as selfishly, on this pres- 
ent life"? 

If Jonathan Edwards and his contemporary, 
John Wesley, are taken as the most illustrious 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 121 

exponents of that individualistic gospel, and if 
isolated statements by them are taken as indica- 
tive of its true character, it must be admitted 
that the case does indeed look bad. Edwards 
did say that he made seeking his salvation the 
main business of his life, and with all the vehe- 
mence of his fiery eloquence, he urged everybody 
else to do the same. And, though separated from 
him by celestial diameters in theology, Wesley was 
absolutely at one with him in his advocacy of that 
religious ideal. 

When he sailed for Georgia, ostensibly to min- 
ister to the Indians, he wrote to a friend and 
made the rather startling confession, "My chief 
motive is the saving of my own soul." Of the 
fifty-nine sermons in his first volume of published 
discourses, only one bears the remotest relation 
to what might be called a "social gospel" — his 
sermon before the Society for the Reformation of 
Manners — and in that he says, frankly: "This 
is the original design of the Church of Christ. 
It is a body of men compacted together in order, 
-first to save each his own soul." 

In his sermon at the foundation of City Road 
Chapel he again gives expression to the same 
theory, referring to the Methodists as "a com- 
pany of people, associating together to help each 
other work out their own salvation." And, as 
is well known, he wrote into the constitution of 



122 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

the church which he so reluctantly established, 
the statement that the only condition required 
of anybody for membership is an earnest desire 
to be saved from his sins and to flee from the 
wrath to come. 

It is the merest commonplace, however, that 
a snap judgment, based upon isolated statements, 
is unjust to any man or any movement. By that 
method the Christ himself would be condemned. 
What did Edwards and Wesley really mean when 
they insisted that a man's primary business in 
life is to make sure of the salvation of his own 
soul? And how did that ideal work? In other 
words, what were its individual and social results ? 
Only as we try to answer those questions honestly 
and fairly can we make any just estimate of the 
spiritual value of that ideal. 

Peabody says that "the inadequacy of pru- 
dentialism is not its belief that to save one's soul 
is of supreme concern, but its belief that one's 
soul can be saved alone." If that is true, and it 
is, then the teachings of Edwards and the teach- 
ings of Wesley after his attainment of an inner 
spiritual experience are forever cleared of the 
imputation of prudentialism. Can anyone read 
those quaint and soul-searching resolutions, made 
by that serious-minded New England youth and 
fail to feel the impact of his grim determination 
not only to become absolutely at one with God, 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 123 

but also "to do whatever I think to be my duty 
and most for the good and advantage of mankind 
in general, whatever difficulties I meet with, how 
many and how great soever" ? Can any thought- 
ful man read that sermon on "The Manner of 
Seeking Salvation," with its solemn statement 
that "It is a business of great labor and care; 
there are many commands to be obeyed, many 
duties to be done, duties to God, duties to our 
neighbor, duties to ourselves," without feeling 
that in the mind of that devout mystic seeking 
one's salvation was a very comprehensive and far- 
reaching enterprise? When, as a result of the 
preaching of that gospel, several hundreds were 
received into the church at Northampton, the 
covenant required of them was that "They 
solemnly promise and vow before the Lord to 
have a strict regard to rules of honesty, justice, 
and uprightness; not to overreach or defraud 
him (their neighbor) in any matter, or either 
willfully or through want of care to injure him 
in any of his honest possessions or rights; fur- 
ther, they will not allow their private interest 
or honor or the desire for victory against a 
contrary party to lead them into any course of 
which their consciences would reproach them as 
hurtful to religion or the interests of Christ's 
kingdom; and particularly, in public affairs, not 
to allow the interests of party or the desire of 



124 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

worldly ambition to lead them counter to the 
interests of true religion." Can the harshest 
critic of the religion of two centuries ago take 
that programme at its face value without feeling 
that its application to existing conditions, even 
in this age of ever-widening conceptions of the 
gospel's social implications, would shake the whole 
social order to its very foundations? And can 
anyone read Edwards's denunciation of the 
element of religious selfishness in the popular 
Calvinism of his day and his insistence that "that 
affection toward God which arises from self-love 
is a mere product of the natural man, having in 
it nothing of the supernatural or divine," without 
coming to see that the very tendencies in the 
modern church which are so insistently attributed 
to the influence of his ideal were attributed by 
him to the misinterpretation and prostitution of 
that ideal? As a matter of fact, when it comes 
to the incisive statement that the only real test 
of any man's religion is to be found in its fruits, 
how much difference is there between the widely 
acclaimed statement of William James that "the 
whole defense of religious faith hinges upon 
action," and Edwards's statement that "there is 
not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the exist- 
ence of which, in any professor of religion, Chris- 
tian practice is not the most decisive evidence"? 
Until he was thirty-five years old Wesley's 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 125 

interpretation of the Christian ideal was, without 
doubt, narrow and selfish. All that has been 
said by Dr. Fosdick and everybody else about a 
"selfish and self-centered gospel," could be said, 
with absolute accuracy, about his. While a 
fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, he wrote in 
his Journal, "I resolved to have only such ac- 
quaintances as would help me on my way to 
heaven." When his father, the aged rector at 
Epworth, alarmed at the prospect of the work 
there falling into the hands of a dissolute parson, 
wrote and asked him to take up the task, he 
answered with twenty-six highly elaborated rea- 
sons why he could not, "twenty-five of which were 
essentially selfish." So indignant was the doughty 
old apostle that he wrote to his ascetic son: "It 
is not dear self, but the glory of God and the 
different degrees of promoting it which should 
be our main consideration and direction in the 
choice of any course of life." 

At thirty-five, however, Wesley had that inner 
spiritual experience which changed his whole life. 
In his own well-known words: "In the evening 
I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate 
Street, where one was reading Luther's preface 
to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter 
before nine, while he was describing the change 
which God works in the heart through faith in 
Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I 



126 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for my 
salvation, and an assurance was given me that 
he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved 
me from the law of sin and death." 

From that time Wesley 9 s ideal was not changed, 
but his conception of the mode of attaining it 
was, because he himself was changed. It is not 
quite true that "he was saved because he had 
found his work." Rather is it true that he 
found his work and did it with a power and fruit- 
age hitherto undreamed because he was saved. 
Whether or not we agree with Wesley himself in 
looking upon that inner experience as his actual 
conversion, the fact remains that he grounded 
all that he was and did in it and it alone. And 
that assurance that he was saved changed not 
his message but its meaning and content. To 
the very last he insisted that every man's main 
business in life is to make sure of the salvation 
of his own soul. To the last he looked upon the 
church as "a body of men compacted together 
in order, first to save each his own soul." But his 
conception of that salvation broadened and deep- 
ened. It no longer meant getting safely to heaven 
by monastic asceticism while the world went to 
the devil, but complete cooperation with God in 
his task of saving the world. Emerging from the 
influence of exaggerated mysticism and Moravian 
quietism, he saw and taught that the highest' 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 127 

interests of the individual are subserved not by 
separation from, but by complete identification 
with, the highest interests of the race, and that 
supreme concern for and attention to the salva- 
tion of one's own soul results in and finally com- 
prehends supreme concern for and striving after 
the salvation of mankind. To use his own words : 
"This old religion is no other than love, the love 
of God and of all mankind; the loving God with 
all our heart and soul and strength, as having 
first loved us — as the foundation of all the good 
we have received and of all we ever hope to enjoy, \ 
and the loving every soul which God hath made, ' 
every man on earth as our own soul." If any 
man in this age of "an awakened social conscious- 
ness" has given utterance to a bigger, broader, 
more comprehensive interpretation of the gospel 
of Jesus Christ I do not happen to have heard 
of it. Furthermore, it is only fair to add that 
Wesley not only preached such a practical gos- 
pel, but administered his societies on that basis. 
"The virtues that make good citizens and good 
neighbors were the indispensable conditions of 
membership in those societies." Omitting all 
reference to the highly satirized clause concerning 
amusements, the fact remains that a rigid appli- 
cation to the modern church of Wesley's ethical 
test as to the reality of a man's religion would 
result in an ecclesiastical exodus beside which the 



128 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

departure of the children of Israel from Egypt 
would shrivel to the proportions of a mere inci- 
dent. 

In fact, Edwards and Wesley both preached 
what seems like an individualistic and self-cen- 
tered gospel because of the unalterable conviction 
that that was the only gospel for a world whose 
root problem was sin. The tragedy in the case 
of Edwards was not that his dominating ideal 
was selfish, but that it was freighted with a hide- 
ous and impossible theology. "The incongruities, 
the absurdities, even, to which Edwards's teach- 
ing gave rise were not altogether inherent in his 
theory (of virtue), but sprang from its associa- 
tion with the Calvinistic doctrine of election or 
predestination." His philosophy may be summed 
up in his own correlated postulates, that "he who 
has true love toward God will be more disposed 
than others to be moved with benevolence toward 
individuals," and that "the love for individual 
or particular beings, in order to be genuine, must 
spring out of the love toward God as its motive 
and sanction." With that theory Wesley was 
absolutely in agreement. No man knew the middle 
and lower-class Britishers of the eighteenth cen- 
tury better than he did, and no man had a livelier 
interest in all that concerned their highest good. 
The injustice of the landed gentry, the corruption 
which permeated contemporary politics, the high 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 129 

cost of living, and all the other "social questions" 
that troubled the world in his day received his 
serious attention. But a great deal that is made 
primary to-day was made secondary by him be- 
cause he was convinced that the only way to bring 
those reforms to pass was to get individual men 
soundly converted, and that the only way to get 
hardened sinners and smug hypocrites converted 
was not by an altruistic appeal, but by a solemn 
summons to get right with God. "The supreme 
concern of Jesus throughout his ministry was not 
the reorganization of human society, but the dis- 
closure to the human soul of its relation to God." 
In that Wesley was content to walk in the foot- 
steps of the Christ. And, like the Christ again, 
his mode of getting that done was not by exhort- 
ing men to go out and do things for their fellow 
men, but by entreating them to repent that the 
Holy Spirit might save them from their sins. 

At the close of his remarkable and remarkably 
discriminating Life of Wesley, Professor Caleb T. 
Winchester says : "Wesley had little confidence in 
any other means to uplift and direct mankind, 
apart from this force of personal religion. . . • 
He was no believer in salvation by education and 
culture, by economic and social reform. . . . He 
did assert most positively — as the Master did — 
that a genuine religious life must be known by its 
fruit in outward conduct, and would admit no 



130 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

man to be a good Christian who was not also a 
good citizen. But he was convinced that the truly 
righteous life, the life that realizes the best possi- 
bilities of human nature, must spring from that 
devout love to God which directs and controls 
all a man's desires, and he knew that such a life 
is inspired and nurtured by influences supernatu- 
ral and divine. Philanthropist, social reformer, 
he was first of all and always the preacher of 
personal religion." 

In that keen analysis of Wesley's philosophy 
and message it seems to me that Professor Win- 
chester has made perfectly clear, once and for- 
ever, what those religious leaders of yesterday 
really meant by their so-called selfish and self- 
centered ideal. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL AND 
THE MODERN CHURCH 



II 



The one proof of a divine sanction upon his work he [Wes- 
ley] found in that absolute and often sudden change of tem- 
per which turned thousands of those to whom he preached 
from vice to virtue, from a life of sin to a life of righteousness. 
This, call it conversion, the new birth, or what you will, was 
an indisputable fact. — Caleb T. Winchester. 

To say that the new evangelism is to be ethical and by that 
to seem to criticize the old, is to prove a misunderstanding 
of the old, and also a misunderstanding of the deepest neces- 
sity of the times in which we live and serve. When a man 
tells me the next revival will be ethical, does he mean to say 
that the last was not? If the great movements under Wes- 
ley, Whitefield, Finney, Moody were not ethical, what were 
they? They were movements that took hold of vast masses 
of men, and moved them out of back streets into front ones, 
and if that was not ethical, surely nothing can be so. Begin- 
ning with the regeneration of the man, they changed his en- 
vironment, and made him a citizen of whom any city might 
have been proud. That is the true ethical note. — G. Camp- 
bell Morgan. 

Your predecessors, the Puritan pastors of New England, 
were strong in their sense of the new social order which was 
to come as the earthly realizatioa of the kingdom of God. 
They dreamed of a genuine theocracy, a civil order in which 
the reign of the Divine Spirit would be complete. However 
imperfect, and even clumsy, modern criticism may deem some 
of their attempts to establish their social ideals, the real con- 
tent of those ideals, the brave conception of an associated life 
which should embody and express the will and purpose of 
God for men, was possessed of high and lasting value. And 
it will add a hundredfold to your own usefulness as pastors, 
if you too may, in the language of our day, hold aloft ideals 
which shall be equally commanding, and labor for their 
realization with the same splendid zeal. — Dean Charles R. 
Brown. 

Here [in Mark 1:14-20] we have the beginning of organized 
Christianity. This is the germinal cell of that vast social 
movement of which foreign missions, the establishment of 
the American republic, and the modern labor movement are 
products. It began with repentance, faith, and self-sacrificing 
action, and it will always have to advance by the same means. 
— Walter Rauschenbusch. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL AND 
THE MODERN CHURCH 



II 



The final and crucial question about anything 
in the realm of religious idealism is, How does it 
work? In other words, as Jesus stated so ex- 
plicitly, and as Jonathan Edwards contended in 
his Treatise on Religious Affections, it is just 
as true of a man's religion as it is of anything 
else that by its fruits ye shall know it. Concern- 
ing an individual's ideal or profession, therefore, 
we need to inquire, What was its effect upon him? 
What kind of a man did it make him? And con- 
cerning a definite religious movement based upon 
a clearly defined interpretation of religion, we 
ought to inquire, what was its effect upon society ? 
As Coe puts it, "The ultimate test of religious 
values is nothing psychological, nothing definable 
in terms of how it happens, but something ethical, 
definable only in terms of what is attained." 

The one prerequisite of a conclusion even on 
that basis, however, is that the judgment be just. 
133 



134 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

William James says that "we must not confound 
the essentials of saintliness, which are the general 
passions (felicity, purity, charity, patience, self- 
serenity), with its accidentals, which are the 
special determinations of these passions at any 
historical moment." It is not fair to test the 
eighteenth-century application of an ideal by 
twentieth-century social standards. Neither is 
it fair to judge the social value of a religious 
movement by its aberrations and excesses. 

Of the fruit of the "selfish and self-centered 
gospel" in the lives of its protagonists, Edwards 
and Wesley, very little need be said. In majestic 
moral grandeur and almost flawless spiritual ex- 
cellence, both men tower not only above their 
contemporaries, but even above the vast majority 
of the choicest spirits of all time. There is little 
wonder that, years ago, a British author wrote 
in the Westminster Review, "From the days of 
Plato there has been no life of more simple and 
imposing grandeur than that of Jonathan Ed- 
wards." And there is just as little wonder that 
Professor Winchester concludes his Life of Wes- 
ley with the exquisite and thoroughly merited 
tribute, "It were idle to ask whether he were the 
greatest man of his century. That century was 
rich in names the world calls great. . . . But run 
over the whole brilliant list, and where among 
them all is the man whose motives were so pure, 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 135 

whose life was so unselfish, whose character was 
so spotless?" 

There is the paradox, the ethical mystery of 
it all. Professor Winchester, in hip Life of Wes- 
ley, and A. V. G. Allen, in his Life of Edwards, 
make it clear beyond peradventure that the out- 
standing characteristic of these exponents of "an 
individualistic and self-centered gospel" was a 
superb and noble unselfishness. In the whole 
spirit and conduct of their lives, they were hemi- 
spheres away from the self-regarding philosophy 
of Herbert Spencer. Edwards was a mystic, but 
the self-absorbed raptures of unrestrained mys- 
ticism had no more part in him that did the crass 
stupidities of prudentialism. He was an ascetic, 
from his young manhood until the day he died, 
but the perverted Christianity of monastic as- 
ceticism, which systematized self-inflicted suffer- 
ings for the sake of "merit," never found lodg- 
ment in his great soul. That which the young 
manhood of the world did a short time ago for a 
limited period of time, he did for a life time, to a 
greater degree and for as exalted a motive. Not 
only because of what is said, but because of him 
who says it, I cannot forbear quoting Allen once 
more. He says of Edwards : "He too is an ascetic 
at heart ; but his asceticism, however it may have 
erred, is of a higher type than the ancient or 
mediaeval forms. It is of the heroic cast which 



136 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

orders life with reference to the highest end. If 
he abstains from amusements, from excess of 
food, from many hours spent in sleep, it is not 
because he believes such abstinence scores so much 
to his merit, but because he has a work to do, 
and, like his Master, is sorely straitened until 
it be accomplished." 

Even during his life time, Wesley's utter sub- 
ordination of all personal comfort and gain to 
the supreme end of cooperating with God in get- 
ting men saved not only broke down all opposition 
but compelled the unwilling admiration of his 
critics. Samuel Johnson complained because 
Wesley was so busy that he made it uncomfort- 
able for "one who likes to fold his legs and have 
his talk out, as I do," and also said frankly to 
Boswell, that "whatever might be thought of 
some Methodist preachers, he could scarcely 
doubt the sincerity of that man who traveled nine 
hundred miles in a month, and preached twelve 
times a week; for no adequate reward, merely 
temporal, could be given for such indefatigable 
labor." It was not so much what Wesley did, 
however, as what he did without, that gave to his 
unselfishness its superlative quality. A man who 
really loved leisure, and more than once in his 
Journal acknowledged its almost resistless appeal, 
he gave up, for fifty-four years, everything that 
might be called by that name, counting that time 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 137 

lost which was not spent either in benevolent ac- 
tivity or communion with God. A man of innate 
refinement, he renounced the cloistered intimacies 
of intellectual centers that he might live with the 
middle and lower classes of sin-sodden Britain. 
And a man of choice tastes, and, for many years, 
of income sufficient to gratify them, he yet chose 
to live on one hundred and fifty dollars a year, 
using all the rest to the glory of God and for the 
good of mankind. As he, himself, quaintly put 
it, when asked by the excise officer for a report 
on his "plate": "Sirs, I have two silver spoons 
here in London, and two in Bristol. This is all 
I have at present, and I shall not buy any more 
while so many around me want bread." 

Of course all that would mean nothing to Ran- 
dolph Bourne, for he derides personal virtue as 
a means of world betterment. But it does mean 
much to those who believe, with Peabody, that 
"the secret of national welfare is in personal 
morality," or, with Saint James, that "Pure reli- 
gion and undefiled before God and the Father is 
this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their 
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from 
the world." And, whether or not it can be said of 
the complacent and prosperous church of to-day, 
surely it cannot be said, after reading the lives 
of these men — and of multitudes more who made 
their souls' salvation the first business of their 



138 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

lives — "against the background of the millions of 
self-forgetful men who fought in France, how 
dark this record looks." Rather must we say 
of each of these, as Edwards said of David 
Brainerd, "His religion was not selfish and 
mercenary; ... his joy was joy in God and 
not in himself." In other words, the incontro- 
vertible testimony of history is to the effect that 
the man who is normally and healthily concerned 
about the salvation of his own soul, to the exclu- 
sion of everything else, will ultimately be more 
concerned for the complete salvation of the race 
and do more for the race than the man who looks 
upon all concern about one's soul as a selfish 
business. 

The total social value of the lives, teachings, 
and work of these two apostles of the individual- 
istic gospel cannot, of course, be computed. It 
is true in the estimate of spiritual movements as 
it is in the estimate of human character, that 
"man looketh upon the outward appearance." 
Only the Infinite Wisdom knows the hidden 
streams of influence and their final effect upon 
human conditions. The judgment of the unbiased 
and thoroughly informed, however, can be trusted, 
here as elsewhere, to give us an approximately 
accurate estimate of values. Again, let it be 
said that, because of its intolerable theology, 
Edwards's work was doomed to certain limita- 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 139 

tions. His deterministic philosophy and the fact 
that his own ministerial work was severely local 
led to perversions and excesses in the great 
awakening. Even at that, however, there is much 
to be said. After making allowances for all that 
and for the fundamental defect of "severing the 
spiritual from the world of human interests and 
realities," the fact remains that in its total effect 
his life and his gospel have constituted "an effec- 
tive ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of 
the earthly into the more heavenly order." His 
protest against the Half-Way Covenant, made 
at such cost to himself, purified the church for a 
century after he had ceased from his labors. At 
a time when the whole tendency in morals and 
religion was toward laxity, he was "destined by 
Providence to be its chosen agent in arresting 
the gradual drift of religious life to yet lower 
levels." When his work was done the separation 
between church and state in New England was 
absolutely assured. Mrs. Edwards was far from 
being the only one who came to realize "in an 
unusual and very lively manner, how great a part 
of Christianity lies in the performance of our 
social and relative duties to one another." It 
is of more than passing significance that Dr. 
Hopkins, Edwards's friend and pupil, had more 
than anybody else to do with the abolition of 
slavery in New England. And Allen goes so far 



140 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

as to say: "Without such a preliminary move- 
ment as the Great Awakening, it is doubtful if the 
sentiment of humanity which has been such a 
powerful factor in modern civilization could have 
made its successful record. The hardness and 
cruelty of the last century [the eighteenth], the 
want of sympathy with human suffering, the in- 
justice which had long reigned undisturbed, were 
gradually overcome when men ceased to remain 
strangers to their inmost selves." Thus does the 
biographer of Edwards and Brooks bear witness 
to the social value, not only of the religious 
revival in which Edwards was the greatest human 
factor, but also of the subjective element in that 
revival. 

John Wesley was a practical mystic and a 
Christian statesman of the first order. The clear- 
ness of his vision and the breadth of his sympa- 
thies were manifested in the many-sidedness of 
his work. Long before institutional churches 
were ever heard of or social service had become 
a fad he effected a religious organization whose 
ramifications extended into almost every depart- 
ment of human life. He founded schools for poor 
children, night schools for unlettered working 
folks, and nourished the unpopular cause of 
popular education; the orphanage at Newcastle 
was known throughout the empire; and in con- 
nection with the London Society were a dis- 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 141 

pensary, a loan office, a book store which fur- 
nished to the poor good literature at low cost, 
and an employment bureau. 

With his keen interest in all that concerned 
human welfare, his unwearied insistence upon the 
ethical test of every man's religion, and his ex- 
traordinary genius as an executive, combined with 
his sane emphasis upon religion as an inner ex- 
perience, there is little wonder that Wesley's work 
affected the whole life of the race. Indeed, the 
judgment of historians as to the social value of 
that work seems to be unanimous. A study of 
the lives of whole multitudes who were changed 
by his individualistic gospel leads inevitably to 
James's conclusion that "the highest flights of 
charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery, to 
which the wings of human nature have spread 
themselves, have been flown for religious ideals." 
And if the radical social idealist, the man who 
thinks of "social results" in terms of economic 
and political reform, objects that this is not 
enough, the answer is that this was not all. Bir- 
rell says that "no other man did such a life's 
work for England." Lecky specifies one phase 
of that work when he affirms that "Wesley was 
one of the chief forces that saved England from 
a revolution such as France knew." F. M. Daven- 
port calls attention to the correlated result in 
his declaration that Wesley's greatest service was 



142 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

not rendered to the church at all, but to the 
cause of democracy. And Green, in his Short 
History of the English People, frankly claims 
that the noblest result of the Wesleyan movement 
was "the steady attempt, which has never ceased 
from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the 
ignorance, the physical suffering, the social 
degradation of the profligate and the poor." But 
it seems to me that Dr. J. H. Jowett, with the 
mental and spiritual acumen which characterizes 
all his utterances, puts the whole thing into start- 
lingly concrete form in his memorable words: 
"The revival of personal religion under the Wes- 
leys gave rise to the four great philanthropic 
movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
turies : the anti-slavery movement, led by Wilber- 
force; the prison-reform movement, led by John 
Howard; the Sunday school movement, initiated 
by Robert Raikes; and the foreign missionary 
movement, led by William Carey." If any modern 
apostle has a greater record to his credit, I would 
like to know it. 

The significance of all this is vastly enhanced, 
when it is remembered that it was the fruitage 
of a lifework whose dominant purpose was not 
social betterment but the salvation of individual 
souls, and whose insistent appeal was the selfish 
appeal now so hotly under fire. To the last he 
called himself "a brand plucked from the burn- 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 143 

ing." To the last he devoted the vast resources 
of his genius, not to establishing "social justice," 
but to "spreading scriptural holiness throughout 
the land." He would have uttered a hearty 
"amen" to Phillips Brooks's sage prophecy that 
"this earth will be a hell when all men go about 
clamoring for their rights." (And, by the way, 
isn't the wisdom of that statement finding tragic 
justification in the trend of events since the close 
of the war?) To all the modern attempts to 
establish religion by altruistic appeal, and in the 
face of every claim that the old form of religion 
is "such a selfish thing," I believe he would have 
made calm answer, in words closely akin to those 
of Lyman Abbott, that "love to God and service 
of man are not the foundations of religion. They 
are the fruit of religion. . . . Christianity has, 
through the ages, been enabling men to love God 
and serve their fellow men, not by presenting 
them principles to contemplate, but by imparting 
to them power through faith in a Person." And 
to bring about that miracle of grace, which made 
helpful wives out of common scolds, noble men 
out of sodden brutes, and good citizens out of 
lawbreakers of long standing, he had no qualms 
about telling them that they never could amount 
to anything in this world or the next until they 
did, before everything else, flee from the wrath 
to come and make absolutely sure of the salvation 



144 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

of their souls. He preached that gospel because 
it secured the results. And he kept on preaching 
it, and making everything else subsidiary to it, 
because he saw it changing multitudes of indi- 
viduals and slowly leavening the whole social 
order. Not long before his death, when the dis- 
solution of body and soul had already begun, and 
the Unseen World must have seemed even nearer 
than ever before, he spoke for the last time, and 
his message was, "Seek ye the Lord while he may 
be found : call ye upon him while he is near." 

In his book The Social Principles of Jesus, 
Walter Rauschenbusch makes the same criticism 
upon the Christianity of yesterday as do so many 
others. He says : "The contribution made by 
Christianity to the working efficiency and the 
constructive social abilities of humanity in the 
past has been mainly indirect. The main aim 
set before Christians was to save their souls from 
eternal woe, to have communion with God now 
and hereafter, and to live God-fearing lives. It 
was individualistic religion, concentrated on the 
life to come. Its social effectiveness was largely 
a by-product. What, now, would have been the 
result if Christianity had placed an equally 
strong emphasis on the kingdom of God, the ideal 
social order?" 

The late apostle of a thoroughly socialized 
Christianity raises a fair question, one which 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 145 

no sincere man would seek to avoid. Dr. Dale 
made the same suggestion of a lack of complete 
social outlook in the Wesleyan revival. Let us 
grant it. Wesley was a political conservative, 
and distinctively a man of his time in his atti- 
tude toward economic questions. But no man 
can demonstrate beyond peradventure that our 
modern principles of political and industrial 
democracy could have been injected into his work 
without irretrievable disaster accompanying it. 
No thorough student of the Scriptures and 
Christian history can deny that the social effec- 
tiveness of Christianity always has been a by- 
product, from the first century until the present. 
And while every sincere man must believe pro- 
foundly in the modern emphasis of the social 
aspects of the gospel, time alone will show whether 
or not the new method of Kingdom building is 
really more effective than the old. If Wesley 
erred, he erred on the right side. If the vast 
movement under his superb leadership lacked any- 
thing, it lacked that which it could best spare. 
If it is true, as Rauschenbusch says, that "every 
advance toward the kingdom of God, that is, 
toward the true social order, involves a raising of 
the ethical standards accepted by society," it still 
holds good that the raising up of hundreds of 
thousands of Christ-transformed, God-fearing 
men, as was done in the Wesleyan Revival, con- 



146 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

tributes more than anything else toward that de- 
sired end. 

When the last argument has been presented 
and the last atom of data used, I cannot help 
thinking of the incident related by Dr. Gunsaulus, 
in his address on Emma Willard. He says that, 
on a raw autumn day, a young English nobleman 
was riding about the country. Feeling chilled 
after a while, he rode into a village and spent 
some time looking for a public house. Angered 
at his failure to find one, he finally accosted an 
old man with the snarling question, 

" 'Why is it that a man can't get a drink of 
liquor in this miserable place when he wants one?' 

"And the old man respectfully removed his hat 
and said: 

" 'Because, sir, a man named John Wesley 
passed this way about a hundred years ago. 5 " 

Superb, I say. And when the last critic of that 
"individualistic and self-centered gospel," that 
gospel which does not hesitate to proclaim the 
salvation of one's own soul as the supreme thing 
in life, has had his say, I am content to hark back 
to those honest words of Brierley's, incorporated 
in his last volume of essays : "If you put 'hell and 
damnation' for all that system of things which 
punishes guilt and the abandonment of the good, 
are the words too strong ? It is hell and damna- 
tion, and those early evangelicals knew it and 



THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 147 

said it. And the medicine gripped and worked. 
. . . We say that this movement, purely reli- 
gious, purely spiritual, was, within the range of 
its influence, the best solution of the social ques- 
tion that has yet been offered. ... If there is 
any other way of creating a true social life, we 
should be glad to hear of it. It has not appeared 
so far." 



CHAPTER XII 

THE BASIC WEAKNESS OF THE MODERN 
CHURCH 



A church whose members recite formularies that have no 
relation to their active life is rotting at the core. — J. Brierley. 

One of the most terrible signs of how the spirit of sordidness 
has filled the world is the lamentable extent to which it has 
pervaded the church. The church is constantly found trust- 
ing in second causes as if she knew of no first cause. She 
elaborates her machineries as if the power lay in them. She 
goes, cap in hand, to rich men's doors, and flatters them and 
dares not tell them of their sins because she wants their money. 
She lets her officers conduct her affairs with all the arts of a 
transaction on the street or an intrigue in politics, or only 
shows her difference of standards and freedom from respon- 
sibility by some advantage taken which not even the con- 
science of the exchange or of the caucus would allow. . . . 
You must cast all that out of the church or you will make its 
pulpit perfectly powerless to speak of God to our wealth- 
ridden and pleasure-loving time. You must show first that 
his church believes in him and is satisfied in him, or you will 
cry in vain to men to come to him. — Phillips Brooks, 

As a religion, Christianity stands out from other faiths by 
its fearless exposition of conversion: of the possible change of 
a man's inner forces by union with another force. Its pro- 
gram is nothing less than that of the development of a new 
humanity; of a spiritual chemistry which changes our primi- 
tive elements by a mystical contact; the emergence from the 
old Adam of "a new creature." In times of religious deca- 
dence, the doctrine is apt to be obscured; kept in the back- 
ground as though it were a vulgarity, something to be ashamed 
of. A virile church will keep it at the forefront, for it is a true 
doctrine and a vital. It can be stated in scientific terms. 
It has all analogy on its side. The church of the future will 
build itself on the chemistry of souls. — J. Brierley. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE BASIC WEAKNESS OF THE MODERN 
CHURCH 

That the modern church has ceased to appeal 
to a multitude of red-blooded, sincere men is one 
of the incontrovertible facts of modern life, and 
that this gradual loss of primacy in practical 
affairs has been caused by a spirit of selfish 
provincialism is as plain as a pike staff. In the 
striking words of Silvester Home, "The modern 
church is so busy saving itself and paying its 
way that it has neither the energy nor the vision 
nor the daring to put the gospel to the proof." 
And let it be said, in all frankness, that those 
words were wrung from the lips of that superb 
man of God after he had been compelled to drive 
a number of obstreperous standpatters out of 
Whitefield's in order to secure the privilege of 
transforming that moribund institution into a 
church militant and of proclaiming from its pul- 
pit "the message of Christianity ... to all sorts 
and conditions of people, in terms of modern 
thought and in application to the whole life of 
the community." 

151 



152 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

That this failure of the modern church to 
function in our complex social order is due to the 
persistent preaching of an individualistic and 
self-centered gospel is by no means so clear. With 
all due regard to the stricture of the "English 
officer 55 whose criticism has been widely quoted, 
and granting the possibility of an unfortunate 
experience on his part, I seriously doubt the 
existence of many pulpits where a Christianity 
is preached that "simply threatens sinners with 
hell and promises comfort to the good. 55 It is a 
well-known fact that sermons on hell, heaven, and 
the Judgment have become so rare that a real 
old-fashioned pronouncement on those solemn 
themes in any of our great city churches would 
create a veritable sensation. As the assistant in 
one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the 
United States put it not long ago, "The preacher 
who threatens his hearers with hell in this age 
stands a fine chance of being told to go there 
himself. 55 Indeed, by no means the least element 
in Billy Sunday's popularity with all classes is 
his vehement visualizing of the devil and consign- 
ment of the unrepentant to perdition. Such 
utterances come with the shock and compelling 
attractiveness of a decided novelty. In another 
chapter I quoted Dr. Tuttle 5 s statement that 
while "Probably all our preachers still retain 
their belief in the dreadful consequences of un- 



MODERN CHURCH 153 

repented sin continuing beyond the grave, . . . 
most of them have laid it away in the attic of 
their intellect, an antiquated memory of the older 
times, to be brought out occasionally for exhi- 
bition." The significant thing about that state- 
ment is that it can be made, with equal accuracy, 
of the pulpits of all the evangelical communions. 

There is not the slightest reason for doubting 
that the God of whom H. G. Wells was taught 
in his boyhood was so repellent as to drive that 
brilliant man to the other extreme. The whole 
race has come to feel the need of a Supreme Being 
of a different temperament and larger propor- 
tions from the one worshiped by many of the 
fathers. And yet, foregoing the temptation to 
discuss the relative merits of H. G. Wells's God 
and John Wesley's, I am led to really wonder 
in how many important pulpits at the present time 
God is actually pictured as "a gigantic police- 
man, clubbing those who break his traffic regula- 
tions and feeding with goodies from his ample 
pockets those who mind his word." If my read- 
ing and observation have not absolutely misled 
me, the general impression made by modern 
preaching upon the common man is that God is 
a sort of a good-natured, indulgent Father, whose 
unexacting kindliness assures everybody of salva- 
tion, whether they take the trouble to repent of 
their sins and put on the form of righteousness 



154 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

or not. More than ten years ago Dr. Charles H. 
Parkhurst said: "It was the doctrine of the 
severest type of Calvinism that God could be just 
according to celestial principles and still damn 
a man who, according to terrestrial principles, 
did not deserve to be damned. And it is also a 
doctrine, which, although pleasanter and much 
more popular, will not bear much closer examina- 
tion, that God can be just according to celestial 
principles and save a man who, according to 
terrestrial principles, does not deserve to be 
saved." During the intervening years, that 
second doctrine has increased in popularity until 
it has become almost a racial obsession. In other 
words, God, in popular thought, is still the 
gigantic policeman, but the traffic laws have been 
abrogated and all, worthy and unworthy alike, 
share in the goodies from his ample pockets. 

I have the profoundest admiration for many 
of the good men who are pointing out the faults 
of the church to-day. Everybody wants effective 
action. But is it really true that "we still hear 
the old appeal that men should come to God be- 
cause they thereby save themselves for future 
bliss in a golden paradise"? Isn't a stricture 
on the modern pulpit for that kind of preaching 
simply fighting a man of straw? Is it not true 
that, in practically every important pulpit on 
the two continents^ the "golden paradise" busi- 



MODERN CHURCH 155 

ness has been taboo for twenty-five years or more? 
In fact, is it not true that, for a full quarter of 
a century, in pulpit utterance, religious litera- 
ture and regular congregational singing, the 
whole matter of the life beyond death has suffered 
an almost total eclipse? The Glory Song, whose 
"shamelessly un-Christian" character I am yet 
unable to see — although I never sang it six times 
— is a survival, not a symptom. The new Meth- 
odist Hymnal, published about twenty years ago, 
shows a marked decrease in the number of hymns 
relating to the future life and a marked increase 
in such magnificent modern hymns as Dr. North's 
"Where cross the crowded ways of life." It is 
a matter of common knowledge that the man in 
the pulpit, along with everybody else, has shared 
in that "absorbing interest in this world," which 
constitutes one of the dominant characteristics 
of the age and which has practically shut out all 
serious consideration of the world to come. And 
the suggestion that the modern church is failing 
to function because the saints who make up its 
membership are selfishly absorbed in making sure 
of the salvation of their own souls while the world 
takes care of itself, is certainly charged with 
unconscious humor. The decay of the prayer 
meeting, the fact that it is far easier to raise 
a million for missions than it is to get a dozen 
strong men on their knees, crying, "God be merci- 



156 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

ful to me a sinner,' 9 and the widespread substitu- 
tion of Goethe's "religion of the deed" for the 
inner experience emphasized by evangelical Chris- 
tianity, all point to the well-known fact that if 
there is one thing the modern layman is not con- 
sumingly absorbed in it is the salvation of his 
soul; and far from being intent on escaping hell 
and getting to heaven, the truth is that he isn't 
thinking anything about either. 

In one of his two great books, published a few 
years ago, Dr. Peabody said, "This separatism 
of religion, this provincialism of the saints, is not 
peculiar to contemporary Christianity, or, indeed, 
characteristic of it." Dr. Peabody was right. 

It is easy to generalize about the failure of the 
modern pulpit and church. It is not so easy to 
bring in a bill of particulars, with evidence suffi- 
cient to sustain it. In the last analysis every 
man's judgment will be based, not only upon the 
facts, but upon his personal feelings as to the 
value of those facts. But it seems to me that the 
real trend of the modern pulpit and church was 
stated by William James in his lectures on "The 
Varieties of Religious Experience." He said: 
"The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Chris- 
tianity, during the past fifty years may fairly 
be called a victory of healthy mindedness within 
the church over the morbidness with which the 
old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously re- 



MODERN CHURCH 157 

lated. We have now whole congregations whose 
preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness 
of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. 
They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment 
and insist on the dignity rather than the depravity 
of man. They look at the continual preoccupa- 
tion of the old-fashioned Christian with the salva- 
tion of his soul as something sickly and repre- 
hensible rather than admirable, and a sanguine 
and 'muscular' attitude, which to our forefathers 
would have seemed purely heathen, has become an 
ideal element of Christian character." 

Those words were spoken in 1902. During 
those seventeen intervening years that conception 
of Christianity has grown and spread until it is 
not too much to say that it now dominates the 
church. There has been a steady and steadily 
increasing change of emphasis in the religious 
world from Augustine's idea of God as an exact- 
ing Sovereign to Clement's idea of God as a 
Father; from the glories and horrors of the 
future to the problems and duties of the present ; 
from religion as personal oneness with a Divine 
Person to religion as the performance of a set 
of duties; from the subjective elements of a Chris- 
tian experience to its objective manifestations, 
and especially to activity as the normal expres- 
sion of faith; from the power of righteousness 
to flourish in and triumph over the most hostile 



158 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

environment to the necessity of a favorable en- 
vironment for the growth of the spirit; from the 
salvation of the individual or any number of indi- 
viduals to the salvation of society as a whole; 
and, in consequence of all this, from personal 
character to social righteousness or social justice. 
To the beneficent results of those changed 
accents no sincere man can be blind and for its 
full fruitage of good every true man must be 
grateful. The new-born social consciousness, ex- 
pressing itself in the blundering but sincere efforts 
of a conservative church to adjust its message 
and methods to the pressing needs of a complex 
social order, in the passionate, heart-broken 
service of heroic spirits like the sainted Rauschen- 
busch, and in the glad sacrifice which the younger 
generation made for the welfare of the race, will 
forever mark a long step forward in the upward 
struggle of humanity. "There never was a time, 
there never was an age when from the highest to 
the lowest there was more common human hearted- 
ness, more earnest desire to alleviate the lot of 
those who have to perform the hard services of 
the world and face its gusty insecurities; and 
never a time when people were more willing to 
make personal sacrifices." John Morley was 
right. And whatever may be said of the provin- 
cialism of the church as an institution, the fact 
remains that if a thorough survey were made, the 



MODERN CHURCH 159 

vast majority of the individuals who constitute 
the church, both ministers and laymen, would 
be found in the van of this vast modern move- 
ment. 

The wider conception of Christianity which 
characterizes the present age ; the growing convic- 
tion that the principles taught by Jesus Christ 
must be applied to economic and political condi- 
tions, however revolutionary the result ; the insist- 
ent demand that the Church of God touch the whole 
life of the community with the Spirit of God and 
smite injustice in every form; those and other 
aspects of the modern religious movement make 
it most momentous. The protest of the ultra- 
conservative against the social gospel as such, 
is utter nonsense. 

Let us be grateful for all the good that has 
come, but, in the interests of the kingdom of God, 
let us not be blind to its potential perils and 
actual excesses. James, the psychologist, was 
made to speak of the trend. Let Shailer Mathews, 
the progressive, warn of the danger. The quota- 
tion is long, but I think it is essential: 

"A danger to which Protestantism — particu- 
larly progressive Protestantism — in America is 
exposed is that its churches shall become mere 
agents of social service. There are many people 
who, in reaction from extreme orthodoxy, have 
come to feel that the sole business of the church 



160 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

is to push social reform. Such a valuing of the 
church brings no small satisfaction to those of us 
who have endeavored to set forth the social signifi- 
cance of the spiritual life, but we cannot let social 
service take the place of God. A Protestant 
church cannot be an ethical asylum ; it must be a 
home in which souls are born into a newness of 
life. We want our ministers to be alive to the 
needs of the hour in politics and in industrial 
reform, quick to come to the championship of 
overworked women in factories and the rescue of 
little children who are giving up their lives that 
the cost of production may be kept low. We 
want the message from the pulpit to be heartily 
in sympathy with our modern thinking. But 
most of all does American Protestantism need a 
spiritual passion, a contagious faith in the 
supremacy of God's spiritual order and an alarm 
at the misery that waits on sin." 

Those words, like the words of William James, 
were written some years ago. The trend of events 
in the religious world since that time has greatly 
increased their significance. American Protes- 
tantism has suffered more and more from the lack 
of spiritual passion and power. And that hunger 
for the bread that is not given, though still lack- 
ing definite expression, is manifest everywhere. 

These facts, and many more which might be 
adduced, justify one in affirming that the essen- 



MODERN CHURCH 161 

tial weakness of the modern pulpit is not that 
it has limited itself to "an individualistic and 
self-centered gospel," or that it has wasted its 
energies in the preaching of a social gospel, but 
that, in all too many instances, it has preached 
no real gospel at all. Randolph Bourne is not 
an impartial judge, but probably he speaks with 
as much authority as the English officer whose 
criticism has been referred to when he says that 
"most sermons of to-day are little more than 
pious exhortations to good conduct." The truth 
of the matter is not that the character of God 
has been made forbiddingly severe, but that it has 
been evacuated of every element of ethical ex- 
action. It is not that heaven and hell have been 
administered to rebellious congregations by a 
process of forcible spiritual feeding, or that the 
salvation of the individual soul has been unduly 
magnified, but that heaven and hell and the salva- 
tion of the soul have so dropped out of modern 
preaching that many of the laity in the evangeli- 
cal churches no longer believe in hell at all and 
vast numbers of folks have almost forgotten that 
they have a soul. It is not that the pulpit has 
failed to adapt the fundamentals of the faith to 
modern thought or to interpret the soul's deepest 
experiences in terms of modern life, but that it 
has ceased to teach, and in many cases to believe 
in those fundamental truths and inner spiritual 



162 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

experiences. Silvester Home, to whom I have 
referred already, was no conservative. As min- 
ister at Whitefield's and member of Parliament 
he showed himself a genuine apostle of the modern 
interpretation of Christianity. He believed in a 
church "wide as human life and deep as human 
need," and died at forty-nine, a genuine martyr 
to that principle. But from the courageous lips 
of that modern apostle was wrung the startling 
lament: "We have some faith left in education, 
but almost none in what our fathers called con- 
version" Let that stand for the collective con- 
fession of the modern ministry, as well it may, 
for the clear statement of the root of the whole 
difficulty. And then let it be matched by Lyman 
Abbott's terse, stern, and uncompromising prog- 
nostication of the inevitable result: "Whenever a 
minister forgets the splendid message of pardon, 
peace and power, based on faith in Jesus Christ 
as God manifest in the flesh; whenever for this 
message he substitutes literary lectures, critical 
essays, sociological disquisitions, theological con- 
troversies, or even ethical interpretations of the 
universal conscience; whenever, in other words, 
he ceases to be a Christian preacher and becomes 
a lyceum or seminary lecturer, he divests himself 
of that which in all ages of the world has been 
the power of the Christian ministry and will be 
its power so long as men have sins to be forgiven, 



MODERN CHURCH 163 

temptations to conquer and sorrows to be as- 
suaged." 

The failure of the pulpit to stress the truth 
finds its natural consequent in the failure of the 
church to manifest the life. Austin Phelps says 
that "the biblical idea of the church is simply 
that of an organized body of regenerate mind; 
the biblical idea of the world is that of the un- 
saved multitude of unregenerate mind. Two 
classes of character, and only two, make up the 
human race as the Scriptures represent it, namely, 
saints and sinners, friends of God and enemies 
of God. A living church always fastens that 
distinction upon the conscience of the world. 
Apostolic preaching was full of it. Religious 
reformations always rejuvenate it." He would 
be a daring man indeed who claimed that any 
such line of demarkation exists to-day, even after 
the term "regenerate" has been given the widest 
meaning. One of the chief causes of moral and 
spiritual decadence in Jonathan Edwards's time 
was the Half- Way Covenant, by which the church 
sought to retain its failing hold on the people; 
and it took Edwards's own sublime sacrifice to 
show the futility of that method. Instead of a 
specific Half- Way Covenant the church of to-day 
has no vital covenant at all. Its chief charac- 
teristic is the farthest remove from a selfish and 
self-centered absorption in the things of the 



164 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

Spirit. Its sorest hurt, and the one from which 
only the old Balm of Gilead can free it, is not 
the contemplative separation of its members from 
the highest interests of the race, but the identifi- 
cation of all too many of them with the lower 
interests of the race. 

The most terrific indictment of the modern 
church I have ever seen or heard was made, not 
by the men of the army or Billy Sunday, but by 
George A. Gordon, the philosopher-preacher of 
the Old South Church in Boston. In his address, 
"An Eternal Gospel," he says: "An immense 
amount of good work is done by all branches of 
the Christian Church. The strongest defenders 
of humanity and the mightiest foes of inhumanity 
are in these churches. Yet it must be said that 
these precious things are confined to the few. 
The effective force in the churches is still a 
Gideon's army, a resolute but meager remnant 
of the total enrolled membership. . . . What 
about the mass of church people ? . . . Who ever 
heard them object to the poor dancing-girl on 
the stage, dancing her soul away to please low 
tastes? Who can report any revolt on their part 
over the shame of the city and the traditions pf 
infamy that carries on its black tide thousands 
of youths to the pit? Do they not know every 
cheap and questionable book, every slimy play, 
every audacious device of the person who caters 



MODERN CHURCH 165 

for pagans, every social function far removed 
from sanctity, every avenue of exclusiveness and 
pride, every black art of gossip, every twist and 
turn of the ropes of inhumanity, and do they not 
attend church and look for the coming of the 
kingdom of God?" 

Are those harsh words? Then let him who 
will prove that they are not deserved. Is the 
ethic suggested by them merely negative? Then 
let some wise man suggest one more positive. And 
does the utterance of such things lead some to 
cry "Treason"? The only adequate answer is 
that of him in whose defiant ears that same cry 
sounded long years ago, "If that be treason, then 
make the most of it." And if anybody can sug- 
gest a better remedy than that proposed by Dr. 
Gordon himself, I would like to hear it — 

"What kind of revival will meet this case? 
Hysteria will not do, nor the devoutness of Lent, 
nor a turn at psychic healing, whether as patient 
or patron. What is demanded here is that the ax 
be laid at the root of the tree ; the new heaven and 
the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness; 
the renunciation of the devil and all his works, 
and the profound and sincere appeal to the 
Eternal God." 



CHAPTER XIII 
SALVATION, INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL 



The disciple of Christ knows that it is a self-contradiction 
to talk of saving oneself in forgetfulness of others. — Henry 
Churchill King. 

The Program of Christianity is the conquest of the world 
by a campaign of testimony through empowered witnesses. — 
Dean BoswelL 

There are two extremes among equally earnest men. One 
class says — they might be called the individualists of the 
pulpit — "Get the man converted and all's got." If a man 
is a new creature through Christ Jesus, he will work out for 
himself a new society. . . . The other class of teachers says: 
"There are conditions that make a decent life impossible, 
cesspools in which they who live must sin, or will sin and 
perish. Therefore change conditions and life will be true." 
These are two half truths. Each alone is a practical fallacy; 
and it would be hard to say which might be the more dan- 
gerous. . . . Our conception of the Gospel must be big 
enough to receive the truth in both statements, to unite the 
two half truths into a whole truth. — Arthur S. Hoyt. 

Those of us who have gone through a clearly marked con- 
version to Christianity will probably remember that we re- 
alized our fellow men with a new warmth and closeness, and 
under higher points of view. We were then entering into the 
Christian valuation of human life. — Walter Rauschenbusch. 

It may seem as if this social aim of religion may depreciate 
the aim of developing our own personality and of saving our 
souls. It ought not. Sometimes it does for a time. But 
we are each so enormously important to ourselves that we 
are not likely to forget ourselves, and the practical struggle 
with temptation and sorrow will teach us to seek strength 
for our personal needs from Christ. In time we shall learn 
to say with Jesus, " For their sakes I sanctify myself that they 
also may be sanctified." — Walter Rauschenbusch. 



CHAPTER XIII 
SALVATION, INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL 

It is affirmed by students of church history 
that in an excess of religious zeal and a misguided 
endeavor to carry Calvinistic theology to its 
logical conclusion, Dr. Samuel Hopkins, friend and 
pupil of Jonathan Edwards, conceived the fantas- 
tic idea that a genuine saint would be willing to be 
damned for the glory of God. The theory died 
of its own dead weight, for it travestied the char- 
acter of God and demonstrated the illogical char- 
acter of logic when rigidly applied to theology. 
Tradition says that the coup de grace was ad- 
ministered by a student for the ministry who was 
undergoing the regulation grueling at the hands 
of an examining committee. When asked if he 
were willing to be damned for the glory of God, 
he replied that he was not, but he was willing 
that the committee should be. Whether or not 
tradition is correct, the fact is that the stupid 
notion that God wanted anybody destroyed for 
the sake of his glory perished from the mind of 
man. 

The modern idea that a real man must be so 

169 



170 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

absorbed in the task of saving the world as to 
be utterly indifferent to and careless of the salva- 
tion of his own soul is equally absurd, illogical, 
and ethically sterile. It is religion upside down, 
if, indeed, it can be called religion at all. Brush- 
ing aside the obvious fact that a man who is not 
vitally interested in his own eternal welfare 
cannot, by any possibility, be genuinely inter- 
ested in anybody else's, we need to remind our- 
selves, in this age of intellectual fog, that the very 
essence of all religion is the eager and conscien- 
tious adjustment of one's own personal relations 
to God, and that this adjustment, effected and 
perfected by faith, constitutes salvation ; and the 
fact that the working out of that salvation com- 
prehends vast and exacting social obligations does 
not affect the individualistic element in the least. 
Again and again Christ emphasizes the spiritual 
principle that he who loses his life "for my sake 
and the gospel's shall find it unto life eternal." 
But nowhere does he even suggest that he who 
loses his soul while he does things for others shall 
find it again. And let it be said once more that 
the doing of things for others will save no man 
unless it is inspired by or leads to vital oneness 
with God. If anything that we do, however noble, 
saves us, then the gospel of salvation by faith in 
Jesus Christ goes by the boards. If the historico- 
critical method means anything at all, it means 



SALVATION— INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL 171 

that the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew can be 
correctly interpreted only in its relation to the 
total teaching of Christ. It is true that many 
a man found God on the shell-shattered fields of 
France, but it is also true that every one who 
found him there did so, not by the act of fighting, 
but by consciously turning to him in a definite 
venture of faith. William James could not be 
accused of prudentialism, by the widest reach of 
that term. He confessed his inability to accept 
either popular Christianity or scholastic theism. 
And yet, in his concluding lecture on the Gifford 
Foundation, he said: "The pivot round which the 
religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is 
the interest of the individual in his private per- 
sonal destiny. . . . Science, on the other hand, 
has ended by utterly repudiating the personal 
point of view. ... In spite of the appeal which 
this impersonality of the scientific attitude makes 
to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it 
to be shallow. . . . The axis of reality runs solely 
through the egotistic places. . . . By being reli- 
gious we establish ourselves in possession of ulti- 
mate reality at the only points at which reality 
is given us to guard. Our personal concern is 
with our private destiny, after all." (The italics 
are mine.) 

Not for one moment am I attempting to make 
Professor James the defender of a self-centered 



172 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

religious ideal. What I am trying to do, and 
what sorely needs to be done, is to show that 
religion cannot for one moment be divorced from 
eternal self-interest, in the truest sense of that 
term. And, while the objective part of reli- 
gious experience "may be incalculably more ex- 
tensive than the subjective, yet the latter can 
never be omitted or suppressed." Winchester 
says that "a religious man is the man filled with 
a sense of the presence of God and of the force 
of spiritual laws here and now, convinced of an 
immediate relation between himself and the Su- 
preme Being." And Bender, in his definition, 
gives it a still more apparently selfish trend, for he 
says, "Religion is that activity of the human 
impulse toward self-preservation by means of 
which man seeks to carry his essential vital pur- 
poses through, against the adverse pressure of 
the world, by raising himself freely toward the 
world's ordering and governing powers when the 
limits of his own strength are reached." 

The correlative fact to be noted is that only 
this inner experience of God, whatever particular 
form it may take, and however it may have been 
secured, equips a man for the effective service of 
his fellow men. Not only will the genuine saint, 
who has attended seriously to the salvation of 
his own soul — that is, to such an adjustment of 
his relations to God as results in a sense of 



SALVATION— INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL 173 

security and peace — be more anxious to live a just 
and helpful life, but he will be more able to do so. 
If his religion is real, ethical as well as emotional, 
not only will he have a more acute social con- 
sciousness, but, what is more to the point, he will 
do all that he does and be all that he is, with new 
power and far greater results. Furthermore, the 
deeper and more real his own inner experience of 
Christ, the keener will be his insights into the 
more complex and intricate social relationships. 
There is vast significance in the fact that the 
daring social ventures recorded in the book of 
Acts followed, and did not precede, the day of 
Pentecost. And there is equal significance in the 
fact that the missionaries of the cross, the men 
and women whose many-sided service to the race 
is only beginning to receive just recognition, are 
of those who first became concerned about and 
made sure of the salvation of their own souls. 
Livingstone was not saved because he went to 
Africa. He went to Africa because he had been 
saved, and because he was possessed of the spirit 
of Him who had saved him. It is very true that 
Frances Willard became disgusted with her fruit- 
less effort to gain the "assurance'' at a Methodist 
altar, and got up and went about her business. 
But it is also true that both her going to the 
altar and her extraordinary lifework were the 
result of deep concern about her own personal 



174 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

relation to God, aroused in her during a serious 
illness. I do not know what Dwight L. Moody 
preached that memorable day when young Dr. 
Grenfell was awakened to make religion the busi- 
ness of his life and flung out to become the apostle 
to Labrador, but I will venture a guess that it 
was the farthest remove from the modern and 
popular "Gospel of Social Duty." 

There is genuine need of getting it firmly estab- 
lished in our minds that, "in the last analysis, we 
have nothing to give but ourselves," and that 
God cannot make large and effective use of us 
in any form of service unless he, by virtue of our 
surrender to him, can speak and work through 
us. "Men see their duty. (They see it and know 
it as men have never seen and known before.) 
What they need is adjustment to the sources of 
power for the performance of duty." Not only 
do we need Allen's warning against "a religion 
which almost seemed as if it could dispense with 
God, so highly did it exalt the independent facul- 
ties of human nature, which spoke of the sober 
performance of moral duty as if it were a substi- 
tute for the passionate devotion to a Being" ; but 
we need a clear grasp of the general principle 
comprehended in Peabody's words, "Many a man 
can teach Christian doctrine to heathen listeners, 
but only a life which has been hid with Christ in 
God can communicate to heathen lives the spiritual 



SALVATION— INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL 175 

energy which proceeds through Christ from God." 
He who desires to do anything worth while for 
his fellow men must first of all, by vital faith, let 
God do a great deal for and in him. It is very 
true that he need not wait until he "feels" thus 
and so before engaging in the important enter- 
prise of helping to make the world better. When 
the bewildered Wesley said he could not preach 
faith because he had none, Peter Bodiler said, 
"Preach faith until you have it, and then you 
will preach faith because you have it." Rightly 
understood, that was sage counsel. Dear old 
Professor Hibbard used to tell his students at 
Wesleyan, "You cannot give a clear expression 
unless you have a clear impression." Or, as 
Phillips Brooks put it, in the large, and in an 
admirable summing up of the whole principle, 
"The unit of power on earth is not God : it is not 
man : it is God and man : it is God in man." 

It is this personal and subjective element in 
religion that makes the conversion and upbuilding 
of individual men the basic work of the Christian 
Church. The awakening of the modern church 
to the real magnitude of its God-given enterprise 
is the outstanding fact in the religious life of 
this troubled time, and an earnest of the fact that, 
whatever mistakes are made, they will be the 
profitable blunders of enterprise and not the fatal 
blunders of apathetic indifference. At last we 



176 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

are catching a glimpse of the scope of that great 
task at which God set himself nineteen centuries 
ago. Christian leaders and a growing number of 
the rank and file are thinking in world terms. 
Thank God for that. The belated brothers who 
reprimanded William Carey, the cobbler, for his 
missionary enthusiasm, and informed him that 
when God wanted to save the heathen, he would 
do so without Carey's assistance, must be turning 
over in their graves. And the other disciples of 
equally circumscribed vision, who are also dead, 
though not yet buried, are finding their seats in 
Zion's temple more uncomfortable with every 
passing week. The slogan of the Haystack Con- 
ference at Williams, "We can if we will," has 
been changed to the yet more dynamic form, "We 
can and we will." The day of foreign missions 
is dead, and the day of a World Church engaged 
in a world enterprise has begun to dawn. 

The stand of the modern church for a social 
order based squarely on social righteousness — 
and not merely "social justice" — is growing un- 
mistakably firmer every day. It is true, lament- 
ably true, that some of the older generation are 
still unable to grasp the significance of the new 
ethic, but they are few in number. Not only are 
the great communions putting themselves on 
record as in favor of the application of the ethical 
principles of Jesus to the whole social life; not 



SALVATION— INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL 177 

only is that momentous message being proclaimed 
from the pulpit ; but the change is being brought 
about by organized effort. When the church 
dares to take the next step and, as Wesley did, 
compel her members, however influential, to square 
their lives with the principles of the Gospel or 
get out, then her skirts will be clean. It may be 
that Gideon's method of developing morale will 
have to be adopted, but if it is, the results will 
be beneficial. 

The third element in the life of the awakening 
church, namely, the determination to project the 
church into the life of the community in an evan- 
gelism as many-sided as that employed and au- 
thorized by the Master, and to establish new 
points of contact, is likewise full of hope and 
promise. The teaching and the healing functions 
are an integral part of redemptional effort and 
not supplementary to it. The established relation 
of the body to the mind, the need of normal forms 
of self-expression for both individual and com- 
munity life, and all the other elements which go 
to make up the principles of real progress, make 
a positive and comprehensive religious ministry 
imperative. 

After all this has been said, however, the in- 
dubitable fact remains that the individual is the 
intellectual and spiritual unit, and that the 
regenerated individual constitutes the only pos- 



178 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

sible basis for a social order either just or Chris- 
tian. A modern radical says, "Many spiritual 
leaders imagine that the kingdom of heaven comes 
simply by regenerating souls, that as man after 
man turns his face upward, society is duly up- 
lifted." I am not sure that I know just what 
he means, but I am sure that the world is having 
a bitter taste of the attempt to uplift society 
without regenerating souls. "Economically the 
saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the 
world's welfare," and the fact to be noted is that 
the qualities cannot be had without the saint. 
Woe be unto the church if she thinks of her task 
as anything less than a world enterprise, but woe 
be unto her if she, in the ardor of that enterprise, 
fails in the fundamental task of saving the indi- 
vidual. In a recent number of one of the most 
widely read magazines, the editor said, "If we 
can help you as individuals, we have done the 
best we can do toward helping the country as a 
whole — for what is the country 'as a whole'? It 
is nothing but a collection of individuals." That 
is sense. And the Christian Church is founded 
on the belief that the best way to help individuals, 
and, consequently, the world, is to get them saved, 
genuinely saved, by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. 
Canon Freemantle said, "The Christian Church 
is designed, not to save individuals out of the 
world, but to save the world itself," and it seems 



SALVATION— INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL 179 

to me that he was not very happy in the form of 
his statement. Peabody came much nearer the 
actual fact when he said, "The problem of other 
centuries was that of saving people from the 
world. The problem of the present century is 
that of making people fit to save the world." Woe 
be unto the church if she fails to stand for the 
inalienable rights of all sorts and conditions of 
men. If she doesn't her doors might just as well 
be closed. But woe be unto the church if she 
makes "social justice" her real message and the 
securing of "rights" the sole end of her enter- 
prise. As Brooks said, many years ago, "The 
church is not going to convert the world by turn- 
ing policeman." Granting that terrible wrongs 
have been done, the bitter fruits of which are now 
being eaten by the whole race, and granting that 
he who does not do justly, lqve mercy, and walk 
humbly before God is not religious, even though 
he occupy a place of leadership in the church, 
it must also be granted that the kingdom of God 
will never be established by a balancing of rights 
between warring factions, each one of which is 
intent upon securing its own. It will be secured 
by the raising up of men who are intent upon 
going the second mile, at whatever cost to them- 
selves. There are celestial diameters between the 
socialists of the New Testament, impoverishing 
themselves for Christ's sake, that the needy might 



180 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

share in all, and the "unsocialistic socialism," as 
a prominent German Marxian calls it, that de- 
mands not only its pound of flesh but possession 
of the whole body politic. In the sane and splen- 
did words of that true friend of all men, Frederic 
Robertson: "Christianity binds up men in a holy 
brotherhood. It is not sent into this world to 
establish monarchy or secure the franchise, to 
establish socialism or to frown it into annihila- 
tion ; it is sent to establish a charity and a modera- 
tion and a sense of duty and a love of right which 
will modify human life according to any circum- 
stances that may possibly arise." 

Woe be unto the church if she fail to minister 
to the world in every way that means the trans- 
formation of human life and character. Her 
impact upon the world must be made through 
manifold agencies. But woe be unto the church 
if she become a mere social center or community 
center for the promotion of terrestrial interests. 
The controversy still rages as to just how much 
the church should do and how much she should 
get done. In all probability, it will continue to 
rage for many years, for it is a complex and 
vexing question. It seems to me, however, that 
Dr. Timothy Prescott Frost was eminently wise 
\tfhen he said, "A live church is not first of all a 
hive of religious industry so much as an inspirer 
of religious industry in the midst of all industries, 



SALVATION— INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL 181 

an upper room where the disciples sit with the 
Master." It means something that, in all his 
varied and blessed ministry, Jesus kept the ques- 
tion of the individual and his relation to God in 
the foreground. Not only is it true that, while 
reforms raged and social problems seethed, he 
was content to talk with humble folks about God, 
but it is also true that all that he did for the 
bodies and minds of men was made the means of 
rousing them to repentance and faith. In the 
puissant words of Nolloth, "He came bathed in 
eternity, to speak to perishing men about the 
things which eternally matter, and he would not 
be drawn from his purpose." It means that, by 
the example and authority of the Saviour of the 
world, the mission of the Christian Church is to 
individual men — because we don't happen to have 
any other kind — and that her real mission is to 
the souls of men. It is essential to think in world 
terms and undertake a world enterprise, but the 
whole thing will come to naught as surely as did 
the crusades unless the inner and individualistic 
element is at the heart of it all. It is absolutely 
right to try to save "the whole man." But it is 
necessary to remember that if his body is healed, 
his mind instructed, his economic status improved, 
while his soul remains unchanged by the power 
of the Spirit, his last state is very liable to be 
worse than his first. And let it be said once more 



182 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

that any effective way of saving a man's soul 
except by conversion is yet to be discovered. 
That is why a real seer has uttered the eminently 
wise words: "Christianity would sacrifice its 
divinity if it abandoned its missionary character 
and became a mere educational institution. . . . 
When the power of reclaiming the lost dies out 
of the church, it ceases to be a church. It may 
remain a useful institution, though it is most 
likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. 
Where that power remains, there, whatever is 
wanting, it may still be said that the tabernacle 
of God is with men." 

In order that this all-important and divinely 
ordained work shall be done in this chaotic time, 
what shall be the message and spirit of the church? 
With what appeal shall men really be won to God? 
Where shall the emphasis be put? To answering 
those questions wisely and well we are all sum- 
moned. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE ETERNAL GOSPEL AND THE AGE 
OF RECONSTRUCTION 



If I go into one of our assemblies of praise, I find that we 
are still tarrying at Jerusalem, waiting for the promise of the 
Father. The mental attitude and spiritual pose of the modern 
church is Pre- Pentecostal. And in this thin and immature 
relationship is to be found the secret of our common weari- 
ness and impotence. We are busy invoking rather than re- 
ceiving, busy asking rather than using. I think that if the 
Apostle Paul were to visibly enter our assembly when we 
are singing these strained and fervid supplications, he would 
wonderingly and anxiously ask, "Did ye receive the Holy 
Ghost when ye belie ved?" We need to learn the things we 
have known the longest. Let us assume the Pentecostal at- 
titude of zealous and hungry reception. Above all, let us 
cultivate a sensitive intimacy with the Holy Spirit. He will 
be our sufficiency, and we shall move about in the enduement 
of Pentecostal power. — J. H. Jowett. 

When we consider the Christian attitude as a whole as pre- 
sented in the New Testament, the conclusion seems inevit- 
able that on the one hand patience, forbearance, meekness, 
and forgiveness are characteristic of its spirit rather than 
resistance to or revolt against oppression and injustice, and 
that, on the other hand, its reliance for the progress of the 
kingdom of God is not on the arm of flesh but on the spirit 
of the living God, on moral suasion and religious influence 
rather than on social pressure or political action. — Principal 
Garvie. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE ETERNAL GOSPEL AND THE AGE 
OF RECONSTRUCTION 

Any attempt to formulate a gospel for an age 
of reconstruction is foredoomed to failure, for 
the simple reason that the gospel for this or any 
other age cannot be reduced to a formula. Like 
life itself, it is full of paradoxes. Always it 
assumes forms as multitudinous as the individuali- 
ties of those who proclaim it and requires em- 
phases as varied as the individualities of those 
who hear it. One of the astounding things in 
Christian history is the way in which God can 
make use of widely different motives to rouse men 
to heroic Christian living. 

Therein, let it be noted, lies the fallacy in much 
of the wholesale criticism of "the appeal to fear," 
"the appeal to selfishness," the representation of 
God "as a policeman," and all the other forms 
of the Christian message so derided just now. 
The important fact is, not that such preaching 
may be theologically sound or scriptural in its 
essence, but that it is psychologically wise and 
spiritually effective. When Phillips Brooks said, 
185 



186 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

"I would rather be a believer in the most material 
notions of eternal penalty and get out of that 
belief the hard and frightened solemnity and 
scrupulousness which it has to give than to hold 
all the sweet, broad truth to which God is now 
leading us and have it make life seem a playtime 
and the world a game/ 5 he gave unanswerable 
answer to every man who sneers at the fathers' 
conception of God while he falls far short of the 
fathers' consecration to God. And when Beecher 
said to the students at Yale, "When men have 
been dead without knowing it, when men have been 
long dead, anything that puts in them the germ 
of life is better than that long propriety of 
damnation," he not only put a quietus on a lot 
of our modern squeamishness against plain preach- 
ing, but he laid down one essential principle for 
a real message for any age, namely, the power to 
rouse men to decision and action. 

Nevertheless, it is true that the dominant char- 
acteristic of every age determines, to a certain 
extent, the form of the gospel for that age. In 
the interpretation of the Christian ideal there 
must be an element of timeliness as well as an 
element of timelessness. No man who lacks a 
knowledge of or sympathy with the world of his 
own time can be an effective preacher. 

Several years ago Arthur S. Hoyt said, "Our 
age has three characteristics easily discerned: its 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 187 

absorbing interest in this world, its social unrest 
and its critical spirit." That was a splendid 
summary of the world situation before the war. 
Of the present it is not so easy to speak, for 
conditions are still chaotic. I believe it is fair 
to say, however, that it is marked by those same 
three tendencies, carried to the extreme, plus a 
clearly defined and growing reaction from each. 
The excesses are tragically self-evident. Prac- 
tical materialism and practical atheism are ram- 
pant; religion is attacked on every side and the 
social unrest has become a social revolution, 
changing the very life of the race. 

Of the widespread turning to the elemental 
things in religion, with its attendant demand for 
certainties and an inner experience, many have 
spoken with clearness and force. Weary of the 
barren abstractions of a critical and rationalistic 
age, and no longer viewing a childlike faith as 
crass credulity, a growing number are seeking 
the simplicities of faith and practice. And of 
the potentialities of unselfishness, awaiting only 
the stimulus of a great cause to make them divinely 
kinetic, the war has been the great revealer. The 
spectacle of a vast multitude willing to renounce 
everything, including life itself, for the safety 
and welfare of others, constitutes a something 
so superb that one impoverishes language to de- 
scribe it. Over against the mob of madmen will- 



188 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

ing to assassinate and destroy by wholesale that 
they may have their share of this world's goods 
is a growing army of heroic souls willing to die, 
if need be, that life may be made rich and blessed 
for others. There is little wonder that to all 
who have felt the compulsion of this selfless spirit 
the conventional activities of the modern church 
seem but aimless nothingnesses and the unheroic 
appeals of the modern pulpit mere moral and 
spiritual syllabub. 

It seems to me, however, that the reaction from 
that fatal absorption in the things of this world 
and the innermost spirit of the present time are 
most strikingly expressed by the anonymous 
author of an article entitled "Whither?" which 
appeared in the Atlantic. I quote at length. 
This Unknown says: 

"The rush of new powers across the horizon 
of our knowledge has made the God of our fathers 
seem petty and old-fashioned. In our singing we 
have exalted the faith of our fathers, but in our 
thinking we have set it one side. Their belief 
in prayer, their resignation to suffering, their 
confidence in the merits of Christ, and their fear 
of the consequences of sin — all seemed to us out- 
grown and absurd. But the pendulum has swung 
once more in the opposite direction. We are find- 
ing that our life is not broader but narrower. 
Beside theirs it is empty and shallow. It cannot 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 189 

stand the acid test. . . . There is much about 
reform, suffrage, the fighting of Tammany, meas- 
ures for the physical betterment of factory boys 
and girls. There are many wrongs to right, for 
the most part centering in the body, but in spite 
of my sympathy with each distinct measure and 
my strenuous efforts to help forward some of 
them, I feel great sense of lack. The horizon is 
near and attainable; the sky comes down like a 
brass bowl over our heads; I stifle in this world 
of nostrums, of remedies, of external cures for 
moral evils." 

That those words were written several years 
ago but enhances their significance. The swing 
of the pendulum has been accelerated rather than 
stayed by the stupendous intervening events. The 
soul hunger, so strikingly articulate in the case 
of the Unknown, is becoming articulate because 
it is just as real in millions of other cases. "In 
every community there is already rising a cry 
for elemental religion. . . . American laymen" — 
yes, and an unnumbered throng outside the church 
— "are asserting that they want to be assured 
of God and immortality and the worth of right- 
eousness. They want companionship in spiritual 
loneliness, comfort in hours of pain, courage in 
moments of moral wavering. Their souls are 
athirst for the Unknown and they will be satisfied 
with nothing save the water that comes from the 



190 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

river of God." Yes, and even where the need is 
not sensed at all it exists. Human life, as it is 
constituted to-day, with all its moral idealism 
and stupendous social program, is all awry, be- 
cause it lacks the background of eternity and the 
consolations and compulsions of a loving, holy 
God, actively present in the souls of men. In 
spite of their generosity and persistent good 
nature and altruistic spirit men are failing to 
regenerate society because of the vast majority 
it cannot be said, as it was said of one of old, "he 
endured as seeing Him who is invisible." And 
even at the risk of seeming hypercritical, I want 
to say that the leaders themselves, the men who are 
trying to work out a programme that will give 
us a new earth, seem to lack that sense of intimacy 
with God which must characterize the truest 
leadership. It is all well enough to believe in 
"Providence," but all through this wild world 
conflict I have waited in vain for the throbbing 
expressions of dependence upon God which marked 
the public and private utterances of Abraham 
Lincoln. 

That is the situation. Obviously, then, if the 
gospel for this new age is to be marked by timeli- 
ness as well as timelessness, it must emphasize 
the Eternal rather than the temporal, the per- 
sonal rather than the impersonal, the inner ex- 
perience as well as the outer expression of reli- 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 191 

gion, and the exactingly ethical and comprehen- 
sive character of salvation. "What the work of 
philanthropy and the reform of industry need 
is the larger horizon of the view from above." 
What the Christian message needs is the element 
of largeness and otherworldliness which gives to 
heroic living the incentive of an infinite outlook. 
It would be a calamity to return to any hectic 
mood whose finest self-expression consists of sing- 
ing oneself away to everlasting bliss. Sincere 
men of all beliefs and no beliefs at all have spewed 
that whole sickly business out of their mouths. 
But the existing situation will terminate in a far 
greater calamity unless there are restored to life 
the infinite worth of immortality and the horizon- 
less scope of eternity. It is high time that men 
were told to look up, remembering their high 
estate, and, under every circumstance, and at 
whatever cost, live "after the power of an endless 
life." Amid the babel of tongues and super- 
abundance of talk about democracy, we all need 
to be reminded that if we are really sons of God 
"our citizenship is in heaven." Men do need 
encouragement, and how can a pilgrim of the 
infinite be encouraged except by the renewal of 
his faith in the Home at the end of the road? 
Take hope out of life and you wreck life. "We 
cannot safely exile heaven from our moral and 
spiritual culture." Men do need warning — how 



192 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

sorely they need it and how little they are getting ! 
— but how shall they be warned unless they are 
told in terms so plain that they cannot fail to 
understand, that sin persisted in terminates inevi- 
tably in conscious alienation from God, which is 
hell, and a hell infinitely more hideous for a being 
made in the image of God than all the roaring 
infernos created by the imagination of man? If 
there is one thing this mad world needs to have 
burned into its consciousness, it is that while God 
is not a policeman he is a holy and ethically exact- 
ing God, and that the man who lives an earthly, 
sensual, selfish life here, and then, with his soul 
seared by sin, plunges into the unknown, in the 
expectation that God will bring him out all right 
somehow, is a blind, fatuous fool. And, above 
everything else, men need the clear consciousness 
of God's presence, the sense of the Infinite within 
them. And how shall they get it unless it is made 
plain once more, not that there is an impersonal 
energy, permeating the universe, but that there 
is a personal God, who orders all our lives if we 
will but let him? The trouble with the immanence 
of God, as conceived by the modern man, is that 
it amounts to a practical pantheism, with God 
everywhere in general and nowhere in particular. 
The personal element must be put at the front in 
the gospel, not only by stressing anew the incon- 
trovertible fact that "nothing but a personal 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 193 

Saviour, in personal relationship with the per- 
sonal human spirit, can communicate power," but 
also by endeavoring to restore to the soul the 
consciousness of the presence of a personal and 
transcendent God, In the deepest and truest 
sense it must always be true that "Christianity 
offers a deeper consolation than any prospect of 
endless life or of millennial glories. It teaches 
the weary and the sorrowing and the lonely to 
look up to heaven and to say, 'ThoU, God, carest 
for me.' " 

If it be objected that this message still lacks 
the heroic in motive and the social comprehensive- 
ness demanded by the new age, let it be said that 
all such will be contained in the presentation of 
an ethical God who offers to man a salvation 
based upon the absolute surrender of the total 
personality to him and resulting in the invest- 
ment of that transformed and vitalized person- 
ality in the stupendous enterprise of helping to 
save the world. As a matter of fact, men are 
willing to do anything but make that complete 
self-surrender, because that is the hardest thing 
to do and requires the greatest moral courage. 
And, as a matter of fact, they must do that, for 
that is the all-comprehensive act which includes 
all subordinate acts. I do not mean simply that 
unless a man is thoroughly converted he will go 
to hell, but the equally important fact that, with- 



194 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

out a growing body of heroic souls, who, through 
spiritual conflict, have put on the form of right- 
eousness, this world will be a hell. "Consecration 
to the will of God, as Christ conceives the matter, 
covers all — this supreme giving of the self in- 
cludes all subordinate givings." And there will 
be no lack of the heroic or of opportunities for 
its manifestation if that surrender is made. I 
still believe, and see no valid reason for changing 
my belief, that the greatest constraining and 
transforming force which can be brought to bear 
upon the hearts and consciences of men is not the 
call to help their fellow men but the call to sur- 
render themselves to God. The man who 
really undertakes to fulfill the injunction of 
Christ, "If any man would come after me, let 
him deny himself, take up his cross and follow 
me, 55 will find his life crammed with the heroic, 
filled with adventure of the highest order, and 
replete with opportunities for the sublimest sacri- 
fice. Conversion — real conversion — is not a way 
of escape from the world: it is the only way into 
the noblest service to the world. Livingstone's 
life motive, rightly interpreted and rigidly ap- 
plied, is big enough and compelling enough to 
grip the hardiest and most daring spirit of these 
daring times : "I will place no value on anything 
I have, or may possess, except in relation to the 
kingdom of Christ. If anything I have will ad- 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 195 

vance the interests of that kingdom, it shall be 
given away or kept only as by giving or keeping 
it I may promote the glory of Him to whom I 
owe all my hopes in time and eternity." In other 
words — and the modern pulpit should ransack the 
riches of its inspired genius to make men see and 
feel this truth — the strong man who falls on his 
face before God in Christ and cries from the deeps 
of his aroused consciousness, "Thy will be done," 
is taking the sure, the only path to heroic living 
and world service. "This petition includes every 
good for every son of man — all high enterprise 
and all great goals. All justice, all truths, all 
beauty, all merciful ministry, are here inclosed — 
all the triumphs of science, of literature, of art, 
of music, of philanthropy, of highest spiritual en- 
deavor — the vision of the city beautiful, the city 
honest, the city serving, the vision of a redeemed 
humanity sharing in the very life of God." Thus, 
in his address on "The Essence of Life," does 
Henry Churchill King give us the very essence 
of the Christian ideal. 

After all has been said and done, however, I 
wonder if the whole matter of "adapting" the 
gospel to the peculiar needs of the age is not 
bulking too large in our thinking. I wonder if 
we are not trying to accomplish by mechanics that 
which can be accomplished only by dynamics, to 
bring about by secondary causes that which can 



196 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

be brought about only by primary causes. In 
plain words, aren't we fussing too much about 
the manward side of the business and failing to 
give due attention to the Godward? There is 
vast significance for the minister of to-day in 
the well-known experience of Thomas Chalmers, 
the greatest preacher Scotland has produced in 
over two hundred years. For years he preached 
with brilliancy and impetuous eloquence on all the 
phases of morality and social reform, but with- 
out effect. Then he fell ill, had a profound per- 
sonal religious experience — returned to his pulpit 
to preach, not "Do this and live," but "Believe 
on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be 
saved" ; and lo ! his ministry was transfigured. 
As he himself put it: "During the whole of that 
period in which I made no attempt against the 
natural enmity of the mind to God, I certainly 
did press the reformation of honor and truth 
and integrity among my people, but I never once 
heard of such reformation having been effected 
among them. I am not sensible that all the vehe- 
mence with which I urged the virtues and the 
proprieties of social life had the weight of a 
feather on the moral habits of parishioners. And 
it was not till I got impressed by the utter aliena- 
tion of the heart in all its desires and affections 
from God; it was not till reconciliation to him 
became the distinct and the prominent object of 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 197 

my ministerial exertions; it was not till the free 
offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ 
was urged upon their acceptance, and the Holy 
Spirit given through the channel of Christ's 
mediation to all who ask him was set before them 
as the unceasing object of their dependence and 
prayers, that I ever heard of any of those sub- 
ordinate reformations which I aforetime made the 
earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the 
same time, the ultimate object of my earlier minis- 
trations. [The italics are mine.] You have 
taught me that to preach Christ is the only effec- 
tive way of preaching morality in all its branches." 
I said that this extraordinary experience has 
great value just now for the individual preacher. 
It has vast value for the whole Church of God. 
Surely, we have here another demonstration of 
the too frequently forgotten fact that Chris- 
tianity's conquest of hostile forces and healing 
ministry to a sin-sick world are not to be attained 
by the wisdom of this world. And surely we have 
valid testimony to the fact that a man in the 
pulpit, speaking out of a vital experience of him 
who is able to save to the uttermost, and a Church 
of the Living God, filled with the Life of the 
Spirit, and ministering to men in the manifesta- 
tion of that Life, will change the face of the world, 
in spite of minor faults in the form of the message 
and in attempted methods of service. Do not 



198 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

tell me that this conclusion is cheap and evasive 
and savors of fanatical pietism. If George Gor- 
don is right when he says we are failing because 
"the modern man is a poor traditionalist, a pale 
Protestant, a literal Christian, minus the central 
idea of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the 
Holy Spirit," then I am right when I say that 
the gospel for this age of reconstruction must, 
above everything else, be a gospel of redemption 
through faith in Christ, by the power of the Holy 
Spirit, and that the church, to function effec- 
tively, as the experts put it, must be a church 
composed of men and women who are honestly, 
actually dominated and directed by the Holy 
Spirit. I do not affirm that this is all we need. 
I do affirm that this is our basic and outstanding 
need. 

In my papers I found a clipping containing a 
statement which seems to me to sum up the whole 
matter. I have no means of identifying the 
author. But what of it? Let an Unknown state 
the satisfaction of a need to which the other 
Unknown gave such exquisite expression. Here 
are his words: 

"The gospel of the Spirit is the supreme need 
of the church to-day. There never was a time 
when the church was so busily engaged in such a 
multitude of outward tasks, and hardly a time, 
either, when the church was more inwardly rest- 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL 199 

less, more spiritually dissatisfied and in many 
places more desperately inefficient. The danger 
of her practicalness is its superficiality. She is 
playing Martha in our generation. The Master 
has come; she rises to serve him, that his will 
should be done in government, in home and school, 
in all philanthropy and good citizenship; these 
are her anxieties. It is all noble and good, spring- 
ing from Christian instincts, undeniably sublime, 
but what if in our business to do things for him 
we lose the attentive ear that listens to him and 
the ready heart that groweth like him? What if, 
like children, we fall to running many errands 
for a Father whom we do not inwardly know ; and 
what if amid the clatter of our hurrying footsteps 
the Master once more were saying, 'Martha, 
Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about 
many things. But one thing is needful 5 ? For 
the real power of the church has never been the 
multitude of her tasks, but the quality of her 
souls; the real business of the church has never 
been the multiplication of quantity in service, but 
the production of quality in men. That men 
should be born anew, should become the organs 
and instruments of vaster spiritual life of God — 
that is the central business of the church, the 
biggest business of the world. . . . The tran- 
scendent God and the perfect Son can make a true 
theology and a lofty ethic, but not a deep religion. 



200 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC GOSPEL 

God the Father revealed in God the Son must 
somehow become God the Spirit in us. The inter- 
pretation of this complete religious experience, 
crowned in the conscious inward communion of 
the living God, is the great task of the church. 
This is the preaching of the Holy Spirit. Nor 
is it impossible even with the practical mind of 
the modern man to make it constrainingly clear." 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, Lyman, on God's 
judgment on the Kaiser, 
114; origins of the Chris- 
tian life, 143; real message 
of the pulpit, 162 

Accountability, preaching of, 
45 

Age, the present; character- 
istics of, 187; spirit of, 188 

Allen, A. V. G., on the in- 
congruities of Jonathan 
Edwards's teaching, 128; 
Edwards's asceticism, 135; 
social value of Great Awak- 
ening, 140; false religion, 
174 

Army, religion in the, 13, 43; 
idea of God in the, 107 

Ashe, Elizabeth, Appraise- 
ment, 108. 

Awakening, the Great; social 
value of, 140 

Beecher, Henry Ward, on 
need of effective preach- 
ing, 186 

Boswell, Dean, on program 
of Christianity, 168 

Brainerd, David, unselfish- 
ness of, 138 

Brierley, J., on cause of de- 
cadence in modern church, 
21; Puritan type of Chris- 
tianity, 95; social value of 
Wesley an Revival, 146; 
hypocritical church mem- 
bers, 150; the new birth, 
150 

Brooks, Phillips, on feasibil- 
ity of preaching Christian 
fundamentals, 60; on Sa- 
tan's attacks, 77; on wis- 
dom of preaching Christ, 
82; curse of clamor for 



rights, 143; weakness of 
modern church, 150; unit 
of spiritual power, 175 - , 
work of church, 179; old 
faith and new, 185 

Brown, Charles R., social 
value of Puritan's religion, 
132 

Burr, Aaron, personal de- 
cision concerning the Chris- 
tian life, 53 

Bushnell, Horace, on proba- 
tionary character of life, 
102; one chance better 
than many, 109 

Caird, Principal, on the spir- 
itual life, 26; religious prog- 
ress, 30, 31 

Calvary, on preaching, 85; 
meaning of, 94 

Carlyle, Thomas, on rela- 
tion of belief and prac- 
tice, 47 

Certainties, the age's need 
of, 84 

Chalmers, Thomas, account 
of conversion, 196 

Character, two classes of, 163 

Christ, Jesus, character of 
public ministry, 65; temp- 
tation, 75; preaching, 82, 
88; on following, 82; and 
individual, 181 

Christian, the, 15, 16, 26; 
trying to be a, 27; differ- 
ence between Christian and 
non- Christian, 31; spirit of, 
as depicted in New Testa- 
ment, 184 

Christianity; the Christian 
life, 10, 28, 32, 143; mod- 
ern modifications of, 14, 
31, 95; evangelical, 15; con- 



204 



INDEX 



tradiction between mod- 
ern trends in, 16, 17; New 
Testament definition, 28; 
according to Wesley, 125; 
as interpreted in past, 144; 
social mission of, 180; mis- 
sionary character of, 182; 
ministry to individual, 193 

Church, the; challenge, 11; 
forced option in work of 
reconstruction, 13, 17; faith 
of, 17; decadence or, 19fL; 
relation to present age, 61; 
primary business of, 62; 
rural church program, 
67; lack of sincerity, 90, 
150; selfishness, 119; Wes- 
ley's idea of, 121; formal, 
150; weakness of modern, 
151, 164, 184; needs of 
modern, 159, 198; biblical 
idea of, 163; main business, 
175, 180, 182; widening 
vision, 176; activities, 177; 
needs, 198 

Clarke, William Newton, on 
holiness of God, 36; man's 
idea of God, 104 

Coe, George A., on test of 
religious values, 133 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on 
unused truths, 50 

Communion with God, 
preacher's need of, 65, 68 

Compromise, spirit of, 111 

Consciousness, social, bene- 
fits of, 158 

Consecration, comprehen- 
siveness of, 194 

Conversion of individuals, 
64, 175; preached by virile 
church, 150; modern 
church's loss of faith in, 
162; and social service, 168; 
social meaning of, 194; 
Chalmers, 196 

Covenant, the Half- Way, 163 



Crane, Stephen, the Red 
Badge of Courage, 74 

Danner, J. Le Moyne, The 
Christian life, 10, 26 

Doctrine, simplicity in, 83 

Dogma, need of, 84 

Drummond, Henry, question 
to students, 28; relation of 
theology to life, 103 

Edwards, Jonathan, analysis 
of his own age, 118; re- 
ligious ideal, 119; interpre- 
tation of salvation, 122; 
Christian practice, 124; 
character, 134 

Evangelicalism, strength of, 
168 

Evolution, effect upon mod- 
ern belief, 14 

Faith, saving, 15, 82 

Fear, in religion, 36, 45; ap- 
peal to, 42 

Forsyth, P. T., on the 
church's foundation, 10; 
the church's faith, 17 

Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 
The war and the Chris- 
tian fundamentals, 82; the 
trenches and the church 
at home, 119; on self- 
centered Christianity, 119 

Freemantle, Canon, on the 
design of the church, 178 

Frost, Timothy Prescott, on 
the nature of the church, 
180 

Garvie, Principal, on the 
Christian spirit as taught 
in the New Testament, 184 

Germany, apostasy, 103 

God, severity of, 37, 113; 
holiness of, 36; man's ac- 
countability to, 102; mod- 
ern conception of, 103, 153; 
soldier's conception of, 107; 
lack of God consciousness 
in modern world, 112; and 



INDEX 



205 



reconstruction, 113; judg- 
ment on the Kaiser, 114; 
Puritan conception of, 168; 
Kingdom of, 179; Presence, 
192; will of, 195 

Gordon, George A., ethical 
character of conversion, 91; 
inadequacy of modern 
Christianity, 118; charac- 
teristics of modern church, 
164; kind of revival needed, 
165; modern man's re- 
ligion, 198 

Gospel, the, essence of evan- 
gelical, 15; adequate, 82; 
demand for simple, 83; 
self -centered, 119; Wes- 
ley's, 127; social, 132, 145; 
social value of individ- 
ualistic, 142; modern em- 
phases, 157; individualis- 
tic, 168; for age of recon- 
struction, 185; element of 
timeliness in preaching, 
186; adapting the, 195 

Green, J. R., estimate of 
Wesleyan revival, 142 

Gunsaulus, Frank, Wesley's 
influence, 146 

Hall, Charles Cuthbert, re- 
ligion of the eighteenth 
century, 118 

Hell, preaching of, 37, 152, 
192 

Hocking, William E., con- 
cerning religion in the 
army, 10; subconscious 
religion, 13; the creed, 16; 
soldier's idea of God, 107 

Hopkins, Samuel, leadership 
in abolition of slavery, 139; 
theory of sainthood, 169 

Home, Silvester, weakness of 
modern church, 151; 
church's loss of faith in 
conversion, 162 

Hoyt, Arthur S., two con- 



ceptions of gospel, 168; 
characteristics of age, 186 

Hypocrisy, in modern church, 
111 

Influence, Wesley's personal, 
146 

Individual, the, interest in 
personal destiny, 171; con- 
version of, 175; as social 
unit, 177 

James, William, Luther's con- 
ception of Christianity, 10; 
on the appeal to fear, 42; 
neutrality unrealizable, 52, 
53; faith and action, 124; 
on saintliness, 134; ad- 
vance of liberalism, 156; 
religion as concern over 
personal destiny, 171 

Jefferson, Charles E., need 
of purpose in the minis- 
try, 60 

Johnson, Samuel, opinion of 
Wesley, 136 

Jowett, John H., on the so- 
cial value of the Wesleyan 
revival, 142; the mental 
attitude of the modern 
church, 184 

Judgment, the, 115; preach- 
ing of, 37; of God on the 
Kaiser, 114 

Kaiser, the, self-deception, 
75; idea of God, 103; God's 
judgment on, 114 

Kelley, William V., the age's 
need of certainties, 84 

King, Henry Churchill, on 
ignoring truth, 50; ene- 
mies of life, 60, 72; man's 
accountability to God, 102; 
on saving oneself, 168; 
comprehensiveness of con- 
secration, 194; comprehen- 
siveness of prayer, "Thy 
will be done," 195 

Kingdom of God, elements of, 



INDEX 



progress, 184; Livingstone's 
devotion to, 194 

Liberalism, in modern Chris- 
tianity, 156 

Life, facing the facts of, 72; 
meaning of, 94, 98; theol- 
ogy and, 102; probationary 
character of, 102, 114; as 
related to conception of 
God, 109; narrowness of 
modern, 188, 190 

Livingstone, David, conse- 
cration, 194 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, on sin, 82 

Love, the fruit of religion, 143 

Man, accountability to God, 
102; common man's con- 
ception of God, 105, 106; 
a religious man, 172 

Mathews, Shatter, on Prot- 
estantism's danger, 159; 
strength of evangelicalism, 
168; modern demand for 
elemental religion, 189 

Methodism, Wesley's ideal, 
121 

Mills, Jacob, religious expe- 
rience, 26 

Ministry, the Christian, es- 
sential characteristics, 61; 
perils of, 65; a vital min- 
istry, 66, 69; transforma- 
tion in Chalmers, 196 

Morgan, G. Campbell, eth- 
ical character of revivals, 
132 

Morley, Lord John, on be- 
nevolent spirit of modern 
world, 158 

Motives mixed, 55 

Neutrality, impossibility of, 
51 

New Testament, value to 
preacher, 39; teaching con- 
cerning hell and the judg- 
ment, 40, 41; teaching con- 
cerning life, 98 



Nicol, W. Robertson, on the 
importance of preaching, 
60 

Odell, J. H., on elimination 
of the supernatural from 
the Bible, 13 

Other- worldliness, modern 
need of, 191 

Parkhurst, Charles H., con- 
cerning modern idea of 
God, 154 

Petrarch, on religion in six- 
teenth century, 45 

Peabody, F. G., the new 
obedience, 82; prudential- 
ism, 122; personal virtue 
and national welfare, 137; 
provincialism in religion, 
156; essentials of service, 
174; duty and power, 174; 
religious problem of pres- 
ent century, 179 

Phelps, Austin, biblical idea 
of church, 163 

Phillips, Wendell, consecra- 
tion to God, 53 

Power, spiritual, 175 

Prayer, and spiritual sin- 
cerity, 80 

Preaching, on hell and the 
judgment, 37, 38; charac- 
ter of modern, 38, 40, 154; 
need of balanced, 48; of 
Christian truths, 60; value 
of, 60; present need of, 62; 
true preaching, 82, 162; 
essentials, 84; irrelevant, 
85; simplicity in, 87; Chal- 
mers, 196 

Presumption, sin of, 111 

Probation, life as, 102, 114 

Protestantism, origin of, 46; 
danger to, 159 

Prudentialism, 122 

Pulpit, weakness of modern, 
161 

Puritan, religion, 132 



INDEX 



207 



Purpose, minister's need of, 60 

Rauschenbusch, Walter, on 
spiritual sincerity and so- 
cial renewal, 78; the begin- 
nings of social religion, 132; 
Christianity of past, 144; 
religious progress and ethi- 
cal standards, 145; conver- 
sion and social service, in- 
dividualistic and social 
elements in gospel, 168 

Reactions, in religion, 46; 
moral, 54, 55 

Reconstruction, need of God- 
consciousness in, 113; place 
of personal repentance in, 
132; gospel for age of, 185; 
characteristics of age, 187 

Reformation, Protestant, 19, 
20 

Religion, sub-conscious, 13; 
in the army, 13, 43; mod- 
ern, 13, 14, 118; fear in, 
36; reactions in, 46; oppo- 
sition of social idealists to, 
56; power of, 72; funda- 
mentals, 82; joy in, 96; and 
the war, 97; of the eigh- 
teenth century, 118; self- 
centered, 119; prudential- 
ism in, 122; personal, 129; 
Puritan, 132; test of, 133; 
definition, 172; as inner 
experience, 172; demand 
for elemental, 189; self- 
surrender in, 193 

Repentance, and social prog- 
ress, 132 

Repplier, Agnes, on impossi- 
bility of neutrality, 51 

Revivals, ethical character, 
132; social value of Wes- 
leyan, 142; kind needed, 
165 

Robertson, Frederic, on so- 
cial mission of Christian- 
ity, 180 



Rutherford, Samuel, on un- 
sound work in salvation, 26 

Saintliness, 134 

Salvation, soldiers' need of, 
12; Wesley on conditions 
of, 12, 21; a spiritual re- 
birth, 15; unsound work in, 
26; Principal Caird on, 26; 
Andrew Murray on, 26; 
active and passive elements 
in, 29; working out, 30; need 
of preaching, 63; of world, 
64; moral process in, 91; as 
interpreted by Edwards 
and Wesley, 122; individ- 
ual, 138, 155, 170; condi- 
tions of, 170; the business 
of the church, 182 

Self-deception, the basis of 
sin, 73; cure for, 78 

Self -surrender, 193 

Sentimentalism, in religion, 
14 

Sermon, final value of, 87 

Service, inner experience es- 
sential to, 174; elements 
in, 175 

Severity of God, 37, 113 

Simplicity, in doctrine, 83; 
in preaching, 87 

Sin, self-deception in, 73; the 
sense of, 76, 89; Sir Oliver 
Lodge on, 82; grace and, 
82; need of preaching, 89; 
root of social problem, 128 

Sincerity, need of moral, 72; 
and social renewal, 78; lack 
of, in church, 90 

Speer, Robert E., on fear in 
religion, 36; two classes in 
society, 50 

Spirit, the, gospel of, 198 

Stars and Stripes, the, edi- 
torial on salvation, 11 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, the 
cross, 94 



208 



INDEX 



Supernatural, elimination 
from the Bible, 13, 14 

Theology, and salvation, 91; 
and the war, 97; and life, 
102 

Tolstoi, Count Leo, on the 
meaning of life, 94 

Trust, in salvation, 33 

Truth, unused, 50 

Tuttle, Dr., on preaching 
of judgment, 37, 152 

Unselfishness, Jonathan Ed- 
wards's, 131; John Wes- 
ley's, 135; revealed by the 
war, 187 

Value, social, of Jonathan 
Edwards's work, 139; of 
John Wesley's work, 139 

Vision, spiritual, 176 

Wallace, Alfred Russel, on 
modern social order, 21 

War, the world, dispeller of 
illusions, 77; and Christian 
fundamentals, 82; and Cal- 



vary, 85; and religion, 97; 
as inspiration, 99 

Wariness, spiritual, 79 

Watterson, Henry, on salva- 
tion of world, 64 

Wesley, John, on salvation of 
soldiers, 12; revival, 20; 
personal experience, 33, 
125; gospel as preached by, 
121, 129; divine sanction 
on his work, 132; charac- 
ter, 135; social value of 
work, 141; personal influ- 
ence, 146 

Winchester, Caleb T., gospel 
as preached by Wesley, 
129; divine sanction on 
Wesley's work, 132; Wes- 
ley's character, 134; defini- 
tion of religious man, 172 

World, modern, sins of, 111; 
law of God-consciousness 
in, 112 

Worldliness, of modern 
church, 164 



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